The Things They Carried

John Yorke explores The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, novelist and veteran of the Vietnam War. Published in 1990 it’s a collection of interlinked stories about a platoon of American soldiers fighting an invisible enemy in the booby-trapped jungles of Vietnam.

But Tim O’Brien is not telling a straightforward factual war story, he’s also reflecting on the nature of experience and memory, and the power of storytelling. The title story describes not just the physical objects the soldiers carried but the profound emotional burden of guilt, trauma and grief.

The narrator of the stories is called Tim O’Brien, just like the author, but he is a fictional character. One of the book’s main themes is the relationship between truth and fiction, and O'Brien frequently blurs the distinction between the two, suggesting that a fictional story may have more emotional truth than a strictly factual one.

The Things They Carried is both a vividly portrayed collection of stories about the often surreal nature of the Vietnam war, and a meditation on the memories of those who fought in it. It reveals that the heaviest burdens soldiers carry are often the invisible ones, and that stories can be a way of coming to terms with those burdens after the fighting has ended.

John Yorke has worked in television and radio for over 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. He created the BBC Writers Academy and trained a generation of screenwriters - now with thousands of hours of television to their names. His acclaimed books Into the Woods and Trip to the Moon explore the structure and power of narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of storytelling, including many podcasts for R4.

The Things They Carried is published by 4th Estate.

Recording of Tim O’Brien from an interview for The National Endowment for the Arts on 9 November, 2011.

Contributor:
Dr Alex Vernon, ME and Ima Graves Peace Distinguished Professor of English at Hendrix College, Arkansas. Author of Peace Is A Shy Thing, a literary biography of Tim O’Brien.

Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Coordinator: Dawn Williams
Sound: Iain Hunter
Producer: Kate McAll
Executive Producer: Caroline Raphael
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4