As a writer myself, I possess a yearning to capture a dream in prose, to anchor my mounting thoughts in reality for someone else to digest. Starting with a free sprint, I secure an image, say, of my mother’s caramel and olive-speckled prescription glasses and the crease at the outer corner of her eye. This image unfolds into a gateway for memories I may have never tapped into to enter the present and become a story. I trap my innocent naivete with the metaphor of a butterfly flapping its wings to propel itself through reality. Yet, as much as my stories are for the reader, they are for myself even more. In this story, I am able to cement the complexities of my relationship with my mother and open up avenues of reflection I never had before. I burn a hole in the computer keys beneath my fingers just trying to fuse my imagination with my writing, unraveling my reflections until the final crux exposes itself: I wasn’t so naive at all watching my mother pack for another trip, imperceptibly trying to protect my heart. I smash this crux into my keys, too, releasing the tension it weaved into my mind without my knowing. When I lay the keys to rest and re-examine the memories I have reawoken and the people I have brought to life, my heart feels rewarded. For Tim O’Brien, his memories threaten to swallow him into the torment from the war and forever disconnect his soul from his body. However, he can find solace in the companionship which lies within the people he resurrects in his stories. His yearning for companionship is so strong, especially after enduring such grim circumstances, that the only means for his reconciliation with his sense of self is the revival of the people he has lost through his stories to save his soul. 

The death of O’Brien’s first love, Linda, sparks O’Brien’s fascination with the power of imagination and storytelling that enables him to endure the losses he suffers in the war. At just nine years old, Tim O’Brien finds a love so intense he does not truly have the words to encapsulate it. Their connection is still a young, giddy love, but it has the maturity of an adult love, a rich love, a love that evades the “chronologies or the way by which adults measure such things” (O’Brien 216). As readers, Linda’s story is the earliest moment in O’Brien’s life that we see, making it all the more salient that it narrates his earliest encounter with love and loss. O’Brien introduces us to this love story in an arbitrary manner, however: upon finding the dead body of an old man after an airstrike, he tells his fellow soldier, Kiowa, that the body reminds him of his first date with a girl he used to know. He draws the connection between the body and Linda, his brilliant first love who died of cancer at age nine, linking the two deaths in their unfairness. O’Brien cherishes his love for Linda so intensely that he refuses to let their passion die with her, and relies on his dreams to preserve her presence. Every night he goes to bed earlier than the last just to be able to “bring Linda alive” in his sleep (O’Brien 230). In his dreams, Linda smiles, ice-skates, holds his hand, and even talks. What starts as his little nighttime secret quickly becomes a necessity. He counts on dreaming Linda alive because he can not bear her abrupt death and this preservation of her memory immortalizes her so O'Brien never has to reckon with her absence. O’Brien reflects that this routine begins his practice in the “magic of stories” (O’Brien 231). Learning to wield this magic in the form of storytelling at such a young age provides O’Brien with the tools needed not only to survive the war but to also survive the trauma of being surrounded by death. Even at age 43, over 20 years after his being drafted, O’Brien continues to write because stories are “a way of bringing body and soul back together,” and after the loss of so many lives to the war, the need to reconcile the two still pervades every bit of his existence (O’Brien 226). His compulsion to write persists driven by his longing to reimagine the dead, just like it did with Linda, allowing him to cope with his trauma. 

Primed with the loss of his first love, O’Brien endures the anguish of war the only way he knows, he unleashes his imagination to preserve his memory of those loved and lost. Yet the magic of stories lies not with the clear report of the past but with the strategic divergence from factual truth. Simply conforming to “happening truth,” as O’Brien calls it, neglects the emotional imprint of the past and fails to satiate the writer’s need to cope with his grief. Therefore, a writer must break free from the shackles of reality and delve into his imagination, because only then will he reach the gut-wrenching essence of his story. Stories are powerful in that they provide an avenue of realization for dreams; the writer can “dream it as [they] tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with [them], and in this way, memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head” (O’Brien 218). In reconciling language and imagination, O’Brien not only captures the emotional core of his memory in a way that the reader can digest but also provides solace to himself in this resurrection of spirits. In his essay “Self Reliance” (1841), Ralph Waldo Emerson expounds on how powerful imagination is without the restriction of reality as we know it: “the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness” (Emerson 3). O’Brien’s dreams of Linda offer a reprieve for him from this “jail of consciousness” and an outlet for the pain he endures. Specifically, he is able to eternalize the presence of those he has lost; first in his dreams and then in the form of a story, O’Brien revives the people he relied on for stability so that he may never live without them. Without the everlasting companionship of these souls, O’Brien might sink into that shit-field with Kiowa and never truly return from the war. 

In savoring the lives of others in his stories, O’Brien actually saves his own in the process. Even though he survives the war physically, his bereavement and guilt would destroy his soul. The companionship that he finds in these revived spirits reunites his soul weighed down in grief and gives him the power to withstand the burden of his severe trauma. O’Brien, then, commits to a sort of second survival every day of his life. In telling stories he continually commits to saving his own life from the “faceless responsibility and faceless grief” that threaten to pull him under (O’Brien 172). He can make the dead smile, laugh, and talk; he can “attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. [He] can be brave. [He] can make [him]self feel again” (O’Brien 172). By relieving himself of some of the encumbrances of nameless guilt, O’Brien can then work towards imagining his story in a manner that preserves his conscience. The remorse he carries every day can be a bit more shrouded by the honor he finds in retelling his emotional truth from the war. Emerson notes that “the force of character is cumulative. All the forgone days of virtue work their health to this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills his imagination? Honor is venerable because it is no ephemeris,” (Emerson 8). Ultimately, Emerson urges that worthiness of honor cannot be calculated quantitatively, and one’s character cannot be determined by one moment. Emerson would then reassure O’Brien’s reflection in that his method of coping and consoling himself for the guilt he feels only elevates his virtue. In other words, O’Brien is validated in attaching names to faceless guilt as a method of mending his soul and releasing his imagination because his future self will always be worthy of salvation and reprieve. This salvation then allows him to see clearer the image of Timmy in his old photographs of himself because “the human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow” (O’Brien 223). Therefore, the blade O’Brien uses to etch his story in “loops and spins'' on ice is sharpened by his revival of the stories of those he loved in life because of the honor it restores to him.            

O’Brien, in a sense, has manufactured his own method for coping with his trauma by not only expressing it through his stories but by consoling himself with the presence of resurrected souls. Human connection is the strongest force in the human experience, and the lack of it can drive a person into perceived isolation of which is detrimental to a person, as it is with Norman Bowker. The same yearning to deal with trauma that unravels Norman drives O’Brien to unveil his grief in the form of a story. Many war veterans, like Norman, return from war feeling disconnected from the person they were before their deployment, and unable to connect with the people in the town they return to. They seek an understanding of their trauma, a sense of reunion of their aching soul with their physical body. Yet instead they are thrust into a world that will never understand the devastation they endured, leaving them in a state of perpetuated anguish. Norman succumbs to this devastation and commits suicide because he does not have a pathway for human connection to reconcile these two pieces of himself. O’Brien learns to combat this anguish in telling stories in the form of writing which can provide the human connection he lacks in his physical world. By exposing the emotional truth of his connection with the people in his past, he soothes his pain and finds a way to move forward. With each story he tells, O’Brien traces a continuous line between his younger self, Timmy, and his post-war self, Tim. In a way, he preserves Timmy’s memory by making a more fluid connection between Timmy and Tim, one that deemphasizes the break between his identity pre and post-war so that he may have a semblance of inner peace. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Self-Reliance Philadelphia, Penn: Henry Altemus Co., 1896.

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried : a Work of Fiction First Mariner books edition. Boston ; Houghton

Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.