In May 1974, O’Brien went to work briefly for The Washington Post as a national affairs reporter before his attention was fully diverted to the craft of fiction writing. He began and continues to publish regularly in various periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Esquire, and Playboy, frequently excerpting parts of his novels as autonomous short stories.
Reconciliation through Storytelling
Of particular note is a piece O’Brien wrote for The New York Times Magazine about returning to Vietnam—his first trip back since his service there. In “The Vietnam in Me,” O’Brien probes the intersection between memory, time, and witnessing the Vietnam War and his personal relationships. Usually guarded and self-conscious as a public subject—for example, it is rare to find a photo of O’Brien without his signature baseball cap—his article was intimate and highly personal. O’Brien made the trip back to Vietnam with a woman for whom he left his wife, and he makes this plain in the article. O’Brien also addresses other sensitive and personal subjects such as his own readjustment after serving in Vietnam: “Last night,” he wrote, “suicide was on my mind. Not whether, but how.”
Despite his personal difficulties and despite his intention to cease writing after completing In the Lake of the Woods (1994), O’Brien continues to produce works that illuminate the human response to war and articulate the strain associated with veterans (like O’Brien himself) reconciling what they saw and did during the Vietnam War with the values and mores they had learned prior to Vietnam.
O’Brien maintains that The Things They Carried “is meant to be about man’s yearning for peace. At least [he] hopes it is taken that way.” For O’Brien, through his own writing career and through the veteran characters he has conceived, this “yearning” is partially satisfied through the act of storytelling, getting at the truth of an idea or event by retelling and embellishing it. In this way, The Things They Carried is a culmination of O’Brien’s earlier works and is a culmination of themes—courage, duty, memory, guilt, and storytelling—present in all his works.
Major Works
O’Brien’s first published work was a war memoir and account of his year as a “grunt” in Vietnam, If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973). This book begins probing the themes that dominate most of O’Brien’s works, particularly the issue of moral courage. He followed up his autobiographical account with a debut novel entitled Northern Lights (1975), which posits two brothers against one another as foils—one brother went to Vietnam and the other did not. The crux of the novel, which is set in O’Brien’s native Minnesota, is a cruel blizzard against which both brothers must struggle. Through this experience, the brothers learn more about each other, and their own motivations and values are illuminated in their own minds. This early work signals the reflection, self-reference, and thorough interior probing of characters that will become the hallmark of O’Brien’s style.
O’Brien’s next novel departs from the more traditional form of Northern Lights. Going After Cacciato (1978) is a more surreal and fantastical novel that brought O’Brien to wider public acclaim and earned him the 1979 National Book Award in fiction. A sort of dark, ironic comedy, the subject, an Army private, Cacciato, who catalyzes the story’s action, deserts his unit in Vietnam and heads for the Paris peace talks. Literally walking away from the war, the other members of his unit are ordered to pursue him. The story is told from the point of view of Paul Berlin, the character that most resembles O’Brien, as they follow Cacciato across the world. O’Brien begins to push the limits of truth and believability in this novel as well as the bounds of temporality, both stylistic choices that reappear in The Things They Carried.
Nuclear Age (1985) was O’Brien’s third novel and the farthest departure from his own experience. Set in 1995, O’Brien’s protagonist, William Cowling, is a middle-aged man who grew up under the atomic umbrella, so to speak. He suffers severe paranoia over the possibility of nuclear war and finds solace in digging a hole in his backyard as an attempt to bury and quiet all the thoughts that antagonize him. Again, in this novel, O’Brien demonstrates his adeptness in creating a comic look at serious subjects, this being the real fear and threat of the Bomb.
After a two-year interim, O’Brien’s short story, “The Things They Carried,” the first vignette in the later novel of the same name, was first published in Esquire, and it received the 1987 National Magazine Award in Fiction. The short story was also selected for the 1987 Best American Short Stories volume and for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories of the 1980s. Additionally, O’Brien’s short stories have been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories (1976, 1978, 1982), Great Esquire Fiction, Best American Short Stories, (1977, 1987), The Pushcart Prize (Volumes II and X), and in many textbooks and Vietnam-related collections.
