Literary critic David Wyatt argues that "war refers, remembers, revises . . . war compulsively alludes."
This reminder is valuable in assigning O'Brien's novel to various genres. A genre is an established literary form that is characterized by a set of like qualities. The Things They Carried has membership in a number of genres, but is most commonly classified as a "war novel." As a genre, the war novel has a certain set of attributes that readers expect. O'Brien works within a long tradition of war literature, and, as Wyatt rightly suggests, The Things They Carried refers to works by O'Brien's predecessors. Clearly, O'Brien's novel recalls — in content form, and style — the work of those who defined modern war literature, namely Wilfred Owen, Stephen Crane, George Orwell, and Ernest Hemingway. While The Things They Carried most openly invokes Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a seminal text in the war novel genre that erects the dichotomy between innocence and experience (which also pervades The Things They Carried), the novel shares more generic qualities with the works of the other authors mentioned above.
For each of these writers, O'Brien included, war is chaotic, and writing about war, using words to understand an experience, is a way to impose order and control over that chaos. For each, the war is depicted at points with visceral and emotional intensity and overwhelming sensation. These authors yoke the glamour of war that this intensity can breed by creating a symbolic counterpoint to the war by means of a romantic subplot. Owen and Hemingway, for example, emphasize how the war experience, and the emotional and physical wounds of that experience, make men less desirable to women and alienate the broken, de-masculinized soldier from his world. Much of O'Brien's body of work resonates with this recurring theme.
