Essay Database

The Things They Carried uses a number of fairly self-contained short stories to create a multi-faceted picture of the narrator and his experiences in Vietnam. The bulk of the stories take place in Vietnam during the war, and a summary of the actual events is very brief. After college, the narrator is drafted unexpectedly and almost flees to Canada. He decides not to escape and goes to fight in Vietnam, where he experiences the pain …

…to the more personal first-person. We also learn of the painful and senseless post-war death of Norman Bowker. The narrator then turns to his own close encounter with death, and to his period of convalescence from his injury. The final story in the book completes the journey into memory and trauma, as the narrator revisits the death of a childhood love while remembering a host of encounters with death and loss experienced during the war.