Neilson vs. O'Brien
Neilson argues that “Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried accords with much of the anti-totalizing strains of postmodernism, and [he] will argue that it is precisely this tendency in his fiction that makes it incapable of opposing the ongoing reconstruction of the war as an American tragedy.” He is mainly saying that in this novel, O’Brien makes the Vietnam war seem not as big of a tragedy that it was. He also mentions "O'Brien does not contextualize his experience, does not provide us with any deeper understanding of the causes and consequences of this war, and does not see beyond his individual experience to document the vastly greater suffering of the Vietnamese." Neilson thinks that O’Brien underestimates the actual effects of the war and fails to go deeper into the tragic experience. He does not think that it gives people the accurate knowledge of the whole controversy. He thinks that it does not capture the truth. In My opinion, I think that is why the novel is so great. We do not know what is truth. I think that O’Brien did that just for his entertainment and to be clever. He left it to the readers to determine what is actually false and what they hold to be true. Neilson practically thinks that the novel lacks to achieve its goal because it does not capture the truth. He is putting down O’Brien for writing the novel. He thinks that O’Brien does not provide a valid argument in making the Vietnam war seem as a tragedy. I do not agree with Neilson. I think that each person has their own perception on things and in The Things they carried, we are provided with a lot of war stories from O’Brien’s viewpoint and what he remembered about that time. So Neilson saying that it does not hold the “truth” is not accurate because each person has their own viewpoint on everything.
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