By Ella Keinan, Class of 2020

You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for a ride, putting things down as they come at you. (33)

Normally, we associate the word “imagination” with creativity and fantasy. In this novel, however, O’Brien introduces an alternate perspective- one that does not replace our initial idea but that sits beside it. Although imagination is normally looked at in a positive light, in The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien implies that imagination is like a magnifying glass; it makes the highs of life higher and the lows lower.

        In a positive way, imagination can be used as an escape to a place better than where someone is, as soldiers Jim Cross and Tim do. After finding Kiowa’s dead body, Jimmy Cross lies down in a lake and lets “himself slip away. He [is] back home in New Jersey. A golden afternoon on the golf course, the fairways lush and green, and he [is] teeing it up on the first hole. It [is] a world without responsibility” (170). Cross uses his imagination to escape the war and go to a place in which his unwanted, immense responsibility does not exist. Lying in the water, Cross is literally “slip[ping] away”, but he is also figuratively and emotionally slipping away. The structure of the chapter “In the Field” mirrors what is happening here. O’Brien alternates between passages about finding Kiowa and passages about the golf course in New Jersey. Jimmy Cross needs the golf course and his imagination to escape this difficult moment, even just for a little bit. Also, throughout the chapter, Cross is described as physically separated from the rest of the soldiers, only with the boy looking for the photograph of his girlfriend. These two are physically and emotionally separated from the rest. Cross is aloof, using their imaginations to think of home and carefree times. Their imagination saves them from the emotional difficulty of war, which in Cross’s case is guilt for Kiowa’s death and feeling overwhelmed at being responsible for the lives of his comrades. In addition, even outside of the war, Tim uses his imagination to escape back to a time of innocence. As a veteran, years after Linda, his childhood girlfriend’s, death, “right here, in the spell of memory and imagination, [he can] still see her as if through ice, as if [he is] gazing into some other world, a place where there are no brain tumors and no funeral homes, where there are no bodies at all” (232). Imagination is an escape for Timmy, the same way it is for Tim and the soldiers. He leaves his state of confusion and grief from losing her to go see Linda again in his own mind. Timmy seeing her “as if through ice” symbolizes that in his imagination, he is frozen with her in a time and place of innocence, hope, and carefreeness. His imagination has the power to make times better and transport him to “some other world”, a better world.

On the other hand, imagination magnifies that the bad things one sees, making them far worse than what the eye sees. When recalling what happened when a soldier was sent into a dangerous tunnel, Tim claims that “in some respects, though not many, the waiting [is] worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination [is] a killer” (10). What the soldiers imagine will happen is worse than what actually happens. In times of anxiety and danger, your imagination often projects the worst-case scenario. In this case it causes the soldiers immense anxiety about going into the tunnel. Often, people overlook this aspect of imagination. In our society we are encouraged to use our imagination for creativity, but we forget about imaginations magnifying glass-like qualities versus rose-tinted glasses. O’Brien uses personification to describe imagination as “a killer”, highlighting the power that it has. Another example of imagination making the soldiers see terrible things is when the war becomes very emotionally difficult for Rat Kiley. He shares with his friend that “sometimes he’d stare at the guys who were still ok, the alive guys, and he’d start to picture how they’d look dead. Without arms or legs- that sort of thing” (211). Rat’s imagination is causing him pain and suffering. He is not even seeing the images in person, but the mental picture of his comrades in a state of harm is enough to haunt him. Unlike seeing gruesome images in person, Rat cannot look away. In a way, the Rat’s imagination allow him to contend with his reality by presenting it more starkly than it is. His imagination is so powerful, he eventually shoots himself in the foot to get out of the war.

As well as skewing one’s perception of the world, imagination exaggerates guilt. When Tim killed a man in Vietnam, he makes up a character and personality for the soldier. Tim believes that the man’s “life was now a constellation of possibilities. So, yes, maybe [he was] a scholar” (122). Tim’s imagination creates a personality for the man he killed. Believing that he can relate to the man makes him feel even worse about killing him. Similar to the fictional character in Tim’s imagination, Tim is a scholar; he was supposed to go to Harvard. O’Brien uses the metaphor about the “constellation of possibilities” to highlight that Tim’s imagination is infinite; there is no limit to how far it can take him in conjuring images of the life the man he killed might have had. Another time a character’s imagination makes them feel guilty is when Tim admits that it took him time to be able to write the story he wanted to about Kiowa’s death; “It was hard stuff to write. Kiowa, after all, had been a close friend, and for years [he had] avoided thinking about his death and [his] own complicity in it” (154). Throughout the book, O’Brien imparts the message that writing is reliving something in your imagination and facing it. The reason that he struggles to write this piece is because of the feelings of guilt arisen by imagining this horrible event. Without writing about Kiowa’s death, and, thereby, reliving it, Tim might be able to ignore his feelings and try to forget about them. By writing them down, the negative emotions come back; on the other hand, Tim can come to terms with the past by imagining what happened. The effects of writing demonstrate the two sides of imagination. Writing and reliving the past is difficult. It makes one relive one’s feelings of guilt and negative emotions; however, facing one’s past is an effective way to reconcile with it.

As a society, our perception of imagination, an idea that is so relevant in our lives, is clearly not nearly as nuanced as imagination is. In The Things They Carried, O’Brien advocates for the complexity of imagination. Imagination may make the war harder, but it also saves the soldiers. It serves as an escape. Life would be harder without imagination than it is with imagination. However, imagination is not just an escape for the soldiers; it can be an escape for anyone. O’Brien is imparting the message that people should appreciate their imaginations and use them. Our imaginations are what separate us from other animals. It’s what gives us power. After all, “Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things” (Wallace Stevens).

Works Cited

O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. NY: Mariner Books, 2009.

Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays On Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1951.