On "The Things They Carried"

Using a listing strategy, O'Brien achieves an impressive amount of significant detail in a relatively short space, tallying off the items each soldier within the unit brings with them as a method of acquainting the reader with the particulars of the different characters. By weaving what begins as a simple inventory throughout the story as a measure of the insecurities and peculiarities each man carries with him, O'Brien avoids coming across as lazy or gimmicky, and instead is able to communicate a story with a real emotional payload to the reader. The sheer amount of information he is able to disperse thanks to the list-style narration allows the audience to get to know a large number of the characters better than the short-story genre normally allows, and as such the more dramatic or climactic events of the story have more impact.

It is quite interesting how O'Brien handles filtering and distancing in the story. He actually practices a fair amount of filtering in passages dealing with Lt. Cross and his feelings towards Martha. We see Martha through Cross's lens, and because filtering creates enhances, or brings to light the distance between the reader and the events at hand, we feel more strongly the emotional distance Cross feels from Martha because of her attitude to him (Essentially, our view of Martha is filtered through both Cross's perspective and the Narrator's perspective before we are able to make our own judgment). Conversely, several sections of dialogue dealing with the aftermath of Lavender's death lack any sort of filtering whatsoever, ignoring even the usual courtesy of traditional quotation markers and cues. This allows the reader a far more visceral experience, eliminating a great amount of the distance between the audience and the characters.