things they carried

In the novel The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien offers the “happy ending” described by Fay Weldon through his own “spiritual reassessment and moral reconciliation.” While the novel itself is not a series of happy memories or events, the telling of them allows the author to come to terms with the loss of his innocence and his own limitations. As the author closes, he finally concludes that while his war-time experiences change him from the person he once was, telling stories is the way he can preserve his innocence and the memories of those he has lost. The author’s “spiritual reassessment” takes place at the end of the novel. He tells a story about the death of a childhood friend named Linda, who describes being dead as being “inside a book that nobody’s reading… all you can do is wait. Just hope somebody’ll pick it up and start reading.” The author parallels this description with his realization that through stories, he can remember what he lost in the war – his innocence, his friends, and his sense of the self he used to be. That he blames the war for these losses is evident, primarily when he recalls the field where Kiowa died:

“This little field… had swallowed so much. My best friend. My pride. My belief in myself as a man of some small dignity and courage… Somehow I blamed this place for what I had become, and I blamed it for taking away the person I had once been. For twenty years this field had embodied all the waste that was Vietnam, all the vulgarity and horror.”

And so the author learns to keep the dead alive with stories, and “in the spell of imagination and memory,” he can bring them into “some other world… a place where there are no bodies at all.” By the end of the novel, the author realizes that as an adult, he is trying to preserve not only the memory of the people he lost, but his childhood innocence as well – he is now “Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.”
The ending to this novel provides an uplifting sense that