Jess Andersson, Fall 2009
Tim O’Brien’s short story, later turned novel, The Things They Carried, embodies the hardships and sentiments of wartime soldiers. The piece offers binary oppositions through the interplay between Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and his fantasized lover Martha. The ideologies of heterosexual love, shown through intimacy, separation, fantasy, and reality, are presented and refuted over the course of the story. A deconstruction of the story reveals how “The Things They Carried” contains “undecidability” within its portrayal of the relationship between these two characters and what that represent.
The piece opens with a depiction of Lt. Cross partaking in an act very typical among soldiers at war, reading letters from his “girl,” “a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey” (O’Brien 354). The reader is led to believe that Lt. Cross loves Martha and his memories corroborate this theory as he “remember(s) touching that left knee” (O’Brien 356) or kissing her goodnight. He carries the letters she has written to him as well as two photos of her and a pebble she found on the beach and sent to him. The text seems to promote the intimacy of the two rather than the separation between them due to the Vietnam War when it describes that “it was the aloneness that filled him with love” (O’Brien 362) and, “he was just a kid at war” (O’Brien 362).
The promotion of this relationship is also shown through the fantasies and daydreams of Lt. Cross while on duty, depicting a favoring of the abstract world to the physical. He spends most of his time “just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha, carrying nothing. He would feel himself rising. Sun and waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness” (O’Brien 360). Lt. Cross prefers the “lighter” fantasy world rather than the heavy reality where he is forced to carry the many material and metaphysical objects and emotions that come with being a soldier.
However strong the evidence is in support of this relationship, there is also strong evidence for the opposite. The letters from Martha that Lt. Cross carries “were signed ‘Love, Martha,’ but Lieutenant Jimmy Cross understood that ‘Love’ was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant” (O’Brien 354). The pictures he carries are also symbols of his false relationship with Martha and he wonders, “who had taken the picture,” because it had not been him, and “he could see the shadow of the picture taker spreading out against the brick wall” (O’Brien 356). Even the pebble found by Martha on the shoreline “where things came together but also separated” (O’Brien 359) shows the desire for their relationship to be a tangible reality, represented by Lt. Cross, but also the denial of that possibility on the part of Martha. Even Lt. Cross’ memories of her are not fully happy or passionately lustful as those of true lovers. Touching “that knee” turns into the memory of how she “looked at him in a sad, sober way that made him pull his hand back” (O’Brien 356), and kissing her goodnight shows the same as, “she received the kiss without returning it” (O’Brien 362).
Because the romantic relationship between Martha and Lt. Cross is not real, it lives within the fantasy world of Lt. Cross. This fantasy world seems to be the preferred mode of survival for Lt. Cross until he believes his lack of awareness of “reality” caused the death of Ted Lavender, one of the men under his jurisdiction. After Lavender’s death Lt. Cross decides to let Martha go, “because she belonged to another world, which was not quite real” (O’Brien 365). In this the text shows the rejection of fantasy and the favoring of reality.
The binary oppositions as originally represented by Intimacy/Separation and Fantasy/Reality would now be swapped to show Separation/Intimacy and Reality/Fantasy. The deconstructive nature of the piece is not hidden from the reader and is identified on a closer reading—it is right there with the reader through the reading process and reinforces the “undecidability” of it; the text cannot decide which ideology it wishes to promote. The hierarchies of the binary oppositions cannot even truly be established because each way of portraying the preference is refuted; the reader cannot actually correctly write a binary opposition with an accurate hierarchy because there seems to be none. Neither A/B nor B/A is more correct than the other to represent the way in which the text reinforces an ideology. The story is not passive-aggressively deconstructing itself like most other works but actively doing so, mapping the reader’s interpretation of the conflicting emotions of both love and war.
“The Things They Carried,” by Tim O’Brien, reveals and undermines the binary oppositions between intimacy and separation, and fantasy and reality through the quasi-relationship of Lt. Jimmy Cross and Martha. The “undecidablibilty” of the work is entwined in the back-and-forth nature of the piece and the indecision concerning the ideologies it promotes or does not promote, easily seen through the interaction or lack thereof between the two characters.
Works Cited
O’Brien, Tim. “The Things They Carried.” Joseph Kelly, ed. Seagull Reader. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. 206-223.