In The Things They Carried, O’Brien recounts several dramatic events of “Night Life” using a flat and matter-of-fact tone. The narrator’s choice of emotionless and flat tone shows that he is trying to remain objective because the war which is portrayed in the book could upset everyone. The rationale was that the narrator wanted to capture all the dramatic events which are attached to both storylines as having different emotions from any reader. He uses Kiley’s struggle to represent the vital importance of fall-out which is connected to mild courage throughout the book. He portrays Kiley’s efforts of doing what all me wish they could carry out, but none of them dare try. Notably, he is doing what is considered cowardly by other men, but with which they are too timid to undertake themselves. The sense fit Rat Kiley comfortably into neither a hero nor anti-hero.

The choice of flat and emotionless tone by the narrator was purposely to relay a mix of important truth as well as the list all things which the soldiers carried as both emotional and physical. Similarly, the tone aimed to subconsciously allow readers to make their fabrication and exaggeration of the story through self-imagination (O’Brien 166). The flat and emotionless stone helped readers to objectify their own experiences while reading the book. For example, according to war and soldiers’ governing rules, the action shows that Kiley failed in his role as a moralist of war. As a result, he failed to become a hero within the moral parameters of O’Brien’s intentions.

Additionally, the narrator’s choice of tone was to help him explain the events which the characters in the book went through. O’Brien says, “They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity” (O’Brien 133). The adoption of this tone was to describe the physical weight of the war as well as the war itself. It also allows readers to recount the nature of battle quickly. Overall, the tone was to leave readers in mild imagination whether the narrator was sympathetic to his decision or not.

Work Cited

O’Brien, Tim. “The Things They Carried.” One hundred twenty banned 7 (2011): 166.

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