O'Brien's Purpose

O'Brien writes The Things They Carried to keep the characters alive. By telling these stories, he creates the image in our mind of a specific person. From that image, emotions grow inside us and we become attached to that character. When that happens, the person becomes alive. O'Brien writes that he "want[s] to save Linda's life. Not her body- her life." (O'Brien 223) When Linda is written about by O'Brien, she lives on.

The reason that the entire combination of short stories are put together is not to save just the characters in those specific stories, but in the end, it's to save O'Brien. "I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life." (O'Brien 233) The idea of infusing all the stories together is to keep everything that makes up Tim O'Brien, alive. By making this novel, O'Brien has become alive in all of us.