SOURCE: Vernon, Alex. “Salvation, Storytelling, and Pilgrimage in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.” Mosaic 36, no. 4 (December 2003): 171-88.

In the following essay, Vernon considers Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried in relation to John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, viewing the former “as a mechanism for questioning the possibility of spiritual gain through waging modern war.”

Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried participates in a tradition of literary revision unique to twentieth-century American war literature, joining e. e. cummings's World War I novel The Enormous Room and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s World War II novel Slaughterhouse-Five in their evocation of John Bunyan's seventeenth-century spiritual tract The Pilgrim's Progress as a mechanism for questioning the possibility of spiritual gain through waging modern war.

The three novels share other characteristics. All three purposefully and explicitly blur the distinctions among author, narrator, and protagonist, and between fact and fiction. Cummings's and O'Brien's...