Selected Shorts: The Things They Carried
Sunday, September 18, 2011
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“ They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.— Tim O'Brien, "The Things They Carried"
Tim O’Brien’s stirring and poignant tale of foot soldiers in the Vietnam War shapes this entire program.
“The Things They Carried” is a powerful fictional depiction of the reality of America’s doomed enterprise in Vietnam. It is the title story of a book in which O’Brien follows one platoon of “grunts”, and its fantastic literary conceit is that their experience can best be conveyed by detailed listings of the actual things that the men carried in their backpacks and pockets, and on their shoulders and necks. When the cataloguing of these things makes the imaginative leap into a description of the less physical things they carried--to include such burdens as guilt, and fear, and memories—the piece earns its status as a great American short story.
The reader is Dylan Baker, whose numerous film and television credits include appearances on “The Good Wife”; “Law and Order”; “Monk; and the “Spiderman” films.
The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”
"The Things They Carried," by Tim O’Brien, read by Dylan Baker.
For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.wnyc.org/shows/shorts/
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Comments [2]
Certain comments made on this article have been removed in accordance with NYPR comment guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.wnyc.org/about/comment_guidelines/
Is anyone getting tired of celebrating (getting misty-eyed) over the poignancy of what turns out to be a story that takes place during war? I have lived through enough US wars in my lifetime that this story just seems to be more evidence of the US love of war. Our troops have murdered all around the world and all we can do is listen to their stories and thank them for the killing that they have done in our name with our tax money. Well once stories like this stop being celebrated and start feeling like the weirdness that they are, I say there is no hope for the United States. Good luck to you all.
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