Favorite Novel

My favorite novel is The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. We read it in my junior year of high school and I really enjoyed it. It was particularly interesting to me because I was also taking AP U.S. History at the same time so we had already learned about the Vietnam War before reading the book. Knowing the historical context of the book really helped me understand what O’Brien was writing about. O’Brien wrote about the physical, psychological, and emotional effects of the war, both during and after. He talked about his internal struggle between his fear and his obligation to serve his country and thus bring honor to his family before going into the war. He wrote stories told from different people’s perspectives in an attempt to understand their side of the story. And he even wrote about some of the soldiers’ lives after they had come back from the war. I liked his writing style a lot because it wasn’t very flowery language and was easy for me to read and understand. And despite it not being flowery language, the book was still extremely descriptive and transitioned between the events of each chapter flawlessly. Sometimes he would mention or describe, in passing, an event that hadn’t happened yet and then in a later chapter he would finally write about the event in more detail, even though we already knew it was going to happen. It created this sense of dreaded anticipation, like in Romeo and Juliet when they tell the audience in the beginning that they’re going to die.