Criticism

Okay, I'm going to be honest here guys. I had a hard time following that article from start to finish for some reason, so if I seem off base in my response you know why. The author of this article seems to criticize Tim O'Brien for making his stories too centered while passing up an opportunity to educate people about the wide reaching effects of the Vietnam war. Neilson stated, "O'Brien does not contextualize his experience, does not provide us with any deeper understanding of the causes and consequences of this war, and does not see beyond his individual experience to document the vastly greater suffering of the Vietnamese." Because of this severe oversight, Neilson says that O'Brien's stories do not give any valid knowledge to the public about the controversy and, "largely reaffirms the prevailing ethnocentric conception of the war." I had very much overlooked this in my first reading of the text, but I can now kind of see where Neilson is coming from. O'Brien sells his book as though it was a way to somehow capture the intangible nature of the war but refusing to try and capture the truth, but The Things They Carried is really a one man show. It is not free of the 'ethnocentric' views of the war making no better than any other war story out there. Though these are all good points that Neilson makes, I tend to disagree that The Things They Carried doesn't achieve O'Brien's purpose. Yes, he mostly ignores the plight of the Vietnamese people there, but he has no experience of that side of the war. O'Brien is writing what he knows of the war, what any typical American soldier would know of that war. To give much more to the Vietnamese would be contradictory to the rest of his novel. The only truth he knew was what he experienced and that is all he wrote. Neilson wants O'Brien's work to be something it's not- a history book that does outline all those "causes and consequences of the war."