O'Brien notes that the book is fiction, and yet, many of the characters seem so real they must have existed, and the lines of reality blur even more when the reader realizes the narrator of these short stories strung together into a novel is named Tim O'Brien. One critic, Catherine Calloway, notes "The relationship between fiction and reality arises early in the text when the reader learns the first of many parallels that emerge as the book progresses: that the protagonist and narrator, like the real author of The Things They Carried, is named Tim O'Brien" (Calloway 250)
That makes the book even more interesting and disturbing. Another literature critic, Jim Neilson, notes, "The Things They Carried was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award" (Neilson 192)
These two consistent characters help hold the book together and keep the characters from becoming disjointed and difficult to understand. At one point the narrator states, "But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget" (O'Brien 38), and this is an important aspect of the antiwar message of this book
The narrator cannot takes his eyes off of the enemy soldier. For instance, the beginning of the story describes "His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole" (O'Brien 124)