Alright so first off that article was ridiculously long and it was tedious to read... so now i must begin, oh joy. Well i think that Jim Neilson had a very harsh, critical and negative outlook to "The Things They Carried". Rather then looking respectively at the whole aspect and book as a piece of literature Neilson stomped on the author's writing by saying explicit and gave a harsh public analysis of his view of "They Things They Carried". The author of the novel gave provided many analytical arguments and aroused many questions among the readers of his novel, for instance the set up of each chapter as a story concluded to the question of how honest the author was being... how much of what he says is true and is not true, and thus what should the reader believe? Although this was a very controversial issue (which every piece of literature should suggest i suppose), i felt that Jim Neilson did not give appreciation to these facts. His words were, "The weakness of The Things They Carried is that O'Brien's imagination is virtually the only reality. 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. In so doing, O'Brien has constructed a text that, despite its radical aesthetic, largely reaffirms the prevailing ethnocentric conception of the war." Neilson argues in this statement that O'Brien does not provide any deeper meaning in his work but shouldn't that be left up to the audience and the readers? A narrative should have meaning to an extent and the reader should be left to interpret the rest... thats how stories and narratives work, it must be convincible, persuadable, believable. Ultimately, i felt Jim Neilson's criticism of "The Things They Carried" was quick to be conclusive and he has a strong opinion on his idea of what O'Brien did with this novel.

Well I really haven’t given this subject much thought but im gonna base themes off of the topics we discussed in class, such as Andreas concept of truth and lies or loneliness and the common role it plays in the stories we’ve read thus far. So I think by giving the narrator his own name and naming the rest of his characters after the men he actually fought alongside in the Vietnam War, O’Brien blurs the distinction between fact and fiction, which makes it impossible to know whether or not any given event in the stories truly happened to O’Brien. It’s like O’Brien intentionally heightens this impossibility when his characters contradict themselves several times in the collection of stories, rendering the truth of any statement suspect. O’Brien’s aim in blending fact and fiction is to make the point that objective truth of a war story is less relevant than the act of telling a story. He is attempting not to write a history of the Vietnam War through his stories but rather to explore the ways that speaking about war experience establishes or fails to establish bonds between a soldier and his audience. The technical facts surrounding any individual event are less important than the overarching, subjective truth of what the war meant to soldiers and how it changed them. Also another theme is that O’Brien argues that in Vietnam, loneliness and isolation are forces as destructive as any piece of ammunition. For instance, he repeatedly emphasizes the impact of solitude on the soldiers. He shows that thoughts, worries, and fears are as dangerous…if not more dangerous, than the Vietnamese soldiers themselves. In “How to Tell a True War Story,” Mitchell Sanders’s story concerning soldiers made so paranoid by their experience on listening patrol that they hear strange noises emphasizing how the imagination can take over instantly in the lonely silence.