In the Shoes of a Soldier: Communication in Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam Narratives

Tim O’Brien is generally considered one of the most important American writers to have emerged from the Vietnam War. If I Die in a Combat Zone, Going After Cacciato, and The Things They Carried – his three narratives that deal directly with his experiences of Vietnam, its physical as well as “spiritual and moral terrain” – have been hailed by critics as literary works that bring the Vietnam experience to life on the page, calling forth powerful reactions from the reader.
This study looks into what it is in O’Brien’s texts that gives rise to such strong reader responses. How do his texts communicate with the reader? What is the reader asked to do in his narratives? What type of role is the reader supposed to play in the act of reading? By first outlining the textual features that make up the reader’s specific role in each text and then analyzing their dynamic functions in the reading process, this thesis explains how O’Brien’s Vietnam narratives seek to put the reader in the shoes of the soldier.