“Right then I started to cry. After a moment Linda stopped and carried her water bucket over to the curb and asked why I was so sad. ‘Well, God,’ I said, ‘you’re dead.’
“Linda smiled. It was a secret smile, as if she knew things nobody could ever know, and she reached out and touched my wrist and said, ‘Timmy, stop crying. It doesn’t matter.’ ”
-The Things They Carried, p 225
In case we have not noticed, The Things They Carried, being a novel about war, is fraught with death. It seems that one cannot read more than twenty pages without another soldier and comrade being shot or blowing up or drowning in mud. It is this horrific pattern of death which gives O’Brien’s apostrophe in this passage so much power. In his imagined conversation with Linda, O’Brien does not talk to just her. He cries over all of his fallen comrades—Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon, Kiowa, Norman Bowker, Monty Phillips—as well as Linda.
It is in this moment that the plot comes to its climax. After describing so many deaths, O’Brien finally is overcome with misery and grief. Yet in that moment, his perception is altered. He learns that in the end, “it doesn’t matter.” Yes, death happens. It happens for everyone, and that is why in the end, weeping over those in the past does nothing. The only thing to do is just to live life as best we can without those who have gone before us.
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