The Things They Carried

4 Pages 1072 Words

All too often, literature is misunderstood by a reader due to the simple fact that he or she has no idea what happened in the author’s life to cause him or her to write a particular literary piece and what the author is trying to pass on to the reader. There are many factors that affect the way an author writes his or her literature including experiences that took place in his or her life, occurrences around the world, and values and beliefs he or she has. In order to understand a text, the reader must first have an understanding of the author. By this, I mean that the reader must seek to identify with the author and try to read the text as the author intended. This involves the reader learning some things about the author and determining what assumptions the author made about the reader’s knowledge, beliefs, and previous literary experiences. Peter Rabinowitz, a literary strategist, referred to this sort of perspective as “authorial” reading and encouraged this view vehemently. As we read a piece of literature, we will try our best to read as “authorial readers” and relate the author and his world to what he or she wants me to attain.
An author named Tim O’Brien wrote about some of the events that took place in the Vietnam War. In his short story, “The Things They Carried,” O’Brien wrote a sort of autofiction about some of his accounts in the war. This is referred to as an autofiction because it is a story about true occurrences in his life with some fictional incidents intertwined into the story, hence an autobiographical fiction. In order to understand his story, we are going to learn some things about his background and his experiences in the war that influenced his literary style and also try to figure out how we, the readers, are supposed to read this particular text. In other words, we will attempt to become the “authorial readers” that we talked about earlier in order to better understand his ...