A Kinetoscope of War: The Cinematic Effects of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried

In a key chapter of The Things They Carried (1990), titled “How to Tell a True War Story,” Tim O’Brien’s fictional narrator—also named Tim O’Brien—turns to the general address of the second-person pronoun to put the reader into a character’s state of mind. You watch the “fluid symmetries,” O’Brien writes, the “harmonies of sound and shape and proportion.” What you see “fills the eye” and “commands you” with its “powerful, impeccable beauty.” Afterward, “there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. [. . .] You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by force of wanting it” (80–81). What you have just experienced is both absolutely true and not at all true, and as you leave it behind you feel vitalized by a universe reordered: