Even as O’Brien opens The Things They Carried, he sets forth the novel’s primary themes of memory and imagination and the opportunity for mental escape that these powers offer. For example, as Lt. Cross moves through the rigorous daily motions of combat duty, his mind dwells on Martha. Importantly, as he thinks about Martha, he does not merely recall memories of her; instead he imagines what might be, such as “romantic camping trips” into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. O’Brien describes these longings of Lt. Cross as “pretending.” Pretending is a form of storytelling, that is, telling stories to oneself. O’Brien underscores the importance of Lt. Cross’s actions by emphasizing the artifacts—Martha’s letters and photograph—and characterizes Lt. Cross as the carrier of these possessions as well as of his love for Martha.
O’Brien moves from employing the literary technique of describing the soldiers’ physical artifacts to introducing the novel’s primary characters. The minute details he provides about objects that individuals carry is telling, and particular attention should be paid to these details because they foreshadow the core narratives that comprise the novel. This technique of cataloging the things the soldiers carry also functions to create fuller composites of the characters, and by extension make the characters seem more real to readers.
This aesthetic of helping readers connect with his characters is O’Brien’s primary objective in the novel, to make readers feel the story he presents as much as is physically and emotionally possible, as if it were real. Though the minutiae that O’Brien includes—for example the weight of a weapon, the weight of a radio, the weight of a grenade in ounces—seems superfluous, it is supposed to be accretive in his readers’ imaginations so that they can begin to feel the physical weight of the burdens of war, as well as, eventually, the psychological and emotional burdens (so much as it is possible for a non-witness to war to perceive). O’Brien’s attention to sensory detail also supports this primary objective of evoking a real response in the reader.
With Lavender’s death, O’Brien creates a tension between the “actuality” of Lt. Cross’s participation in battle and his interior, imagined fantasies that give him refuge. In burning Martha’s letters and accepting blame for Lavender’s death, Cross’s conflicting trains of thought signal the reader to be cautious when deciding what is truth or fantasy and when assigning meaning to these stories. While he destroyed the physical accoutrements, the mementos of Martha, Lt. Cross continues to carry the memory of her with him. To that memory is also added the burden of grief and guilt. Despite this emotional burden, O’Brien, as he continues in the following chapter, begins to highlight the central question of the novel: Why people carry the things they do?
