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.