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This essay examines The Things They Carried in relation to John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and Victor Turner's investigations of religious pilgrimages, suggesting that O'Brien's novel asks every war writer's essential question: Can a veteran achieve moral or spiritual redemption through storytelling?
Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried participates in a tradition of literary revision unique to twentieth-century American war literature, joining e.e. cummings's World War I novel The Enormous Room and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s World War II novel Slaughterhouse-Five in their evocation of John Bunyan's seventeenth-century spiritual tract The Pilgrim's Progress as a mechanism for questioning the possibility of spiritual gain through waging modern war.
The three novels share other characteristics. All three purposefully and explicitly blur the distinctions among author, narrator, and protagonist, and between fact and fiction. Cummings's and O'Brien's first-person narrator-characters bear their authors' names, Edward E. Cummings and Tim O'Brien. We never learn the name of Vonnegut's first-person fictional narrator, but certain facts of his biography, like O'Brien's narrator-character's, match his creator's. Early in O'Brien's text, Tim the narrator receives a visit to his home from Jimmy Cross; early in Vonnegut's text, the narrator visits the home of his old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare. And the first lines of Slaughterhouse-Five sound very much like something out of The Things They Carried: "All of this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true" (1). The first American edition of The Enormous Room begins with an introduction by cummings's father composed of explanatory narrative and two actual letters he had written, to President Woodrow Wilson and to a staff officer from the Judge Advocate General's office in Paris, concerning the imprisonment and release of his son, who of course has the name of both the text's author and its first-person narrator. All three novels also tell their stories recursively, more-or-less following a storyline but doing so in a non-continuous, episodic, and fragmented manner.
The three novels also, given their evocation of The Pilgrim's Progress, concern themselves with the subject of salvation. In The Enormous Room, within the context of the Bunyan text, cummings writes about salvation in terms of happiness: "To leave [. . .] [the prison] with the knowledge, and worse than that the feeling,...