The+Things+They+Carried

Radio interview: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127133594

Background information on the author, including many interviews and information on his literary works: http://www.illyria.com/tobhp.html

//**The Things They Carried**//  **Alternative Assessment Assignment**

**Goals** 1) Understand the overall approach taken by an author or narrator (e.g., point of view, kinds of evidence used) in more challenging passages  2) Understand implied or subtly stated cause-effect relationships in more challenging passages  3) Discern which details, though they may appear in different sections throughout a passage, support important points in more challenging passages  4) Understand and generalize about portions of a complex literary narrative

**Literary Terms:**   **Metafiction**  is a type of [|fiction]  that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion. It is the literary term describing fictional writing that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually using [|irony]  and self-reflection. **Setting** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">
 * The teacher will provide mini-lessons on the following terms and talk about how they work in a traditional narrative:**
 * Rising action**
 * climax**
 * falling action/denouement**

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Where does a story begin and end? <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> How much is a story about what’s on the surface and how much is it about what’s going on in the background? <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> What role can irony play in a story? <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Does a story need to be true to be real or does a story need to be real to be true?
 * Guiding Questions for the Book:**

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">**Assignment: Analyze the Nature of Truth in Fiction** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Each student will complete three analyses and refine one of her or his choice to present in small group discussion. Each analysis must cover the following items: Here's the rubric for the
 * 1) <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; list-style-type: decimal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All of the three Guiding Questions (see above) addressed with evidence from each story.
 * 2) <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; list-style-type: decimal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Definition of terms unknown
 * 3) <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; list-style-type: decimal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meta-fiction techniques presented in the story (can be presented through text or a visual representation)
 * 4) <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; list-style-type: decimal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Identify two to three questions the story raises about stories and/or this particular story
 * 5) <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; list-style-type: decimal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Extend out the narrative, in some way that builds on the published story or revises it in some way, written in the voice of the narrator

The following appears on the wikipedia page for Tim O'Brien:

**Tim O'Brien** (born October 1, 1946 in [|Minnesota] ) is an [|American] [|novelist] who often writes about his experiences in the [|Vietnam War] and the impact the war had on the American servicemen who fought there. He has held the endowed chair at the [|MFA program] of [|Texas State University-San Marcos] several times, from 2003 to 2004, then from 2005 to 2006, and a third time from 2008 to 2009.<span style="background-image: none; color: #0645ad; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1em; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[|[1]]

He was born in [|Austin, Minnesota] ,<span style="background-image: none; color: #0645ad; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1em; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[|[2]] a city of about 20,000 (a setting which figures prominently in his novels). When O'Brien was twelve, his family, including an older sister and a brother, moved to [|Worthington, Minnesota], a place that once billed itself as "the turkey capital of the world." Worthington had a large influence on O’Brien’s imagination and early development as an author. The town is located on Lake Okabena in the western portion of the state and serves as the setting for some of his stories, especially those in the novel // [|The Things They Carried] //. He earned his BA in [|Political Science] from [|Macalester College] in 1968. That same year he was drafted into the Army and was sent to [|Vietnam], where he served from 1968 to 1970 in 3rd Platoon, A Co., 5th Batt. 46th Inf., as an infantryman. O'Brien's tour of duty was 1969-70. He served in the [|Americal Division], the division that contained the unit involved in the infamous [|My Lai Massacre]. O'Brien has said that when his unit got to the area around My Lai (referred to as "Pinkville" by the U.S. forces), "we all wondered why the place was so hostile. We did not know there had been a massacre there a year earlier. The news about that only came out later, while we were there, and then we knew."<span style="background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat; color: #3366bb; padding-right: 13px; text-decoration: none;">[|[4]] Upon completing his tour of duty, O'Brien went on to [|graduate school] at [|Harvard University] and received an [|internship] at the // [|Washington Post] //. His writing career was launched in 1973 with the release of // [|If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home] //, about his war experiences. In this memoir, O'Brien writes: "Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories." While O' Brien insists it is not his job or his place to discuss the politics of the Vietnam War, he does occasionally let fly. Speaking years later about his upbringing and the war, O'Brien called his hometown "a town that congratulates itself, day after day, on its own ignorance of the world: a town that got us into Vietnam. Uh, the people in that town sent me to that war, you know, couldn't spell the word ' [|Hanoi] ' if you spotted them three vowels."<span style="background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat; color: #3366bb; padding-right: 13px; text-decoration: none;">[|[5]] Contrasting the [|continuing American search for U.S. MIA/POWs in Vietnam] with the reality of the Vietnamese war dead, he calls the American perspective "A perverse and outrageous double standard. What if things were reversed? What if the Vietnamese were to ask us, or to require us, to locate and identify each of their own MIAs? Numbers alone make it impossible: 100,000 is a conservative estimate. Maybe double that. Maybe triple. From my own sliver of experience — one year at war, one set of eyes — I can testify to the lasting anonymity of a great many Vietnamese dead."<span style="background-position: 100% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat; color: #3366bb; padding-right: 13px; text-decoration: none;">[|[6]]  One attribute in O'Brien's work is the blur between [|fiction] and [|reality] ; labeled "verisimilitude", his work contains actual details of the situations he experienced; while that is not unusual, his conscious, explicit, and metafictional approach to the distinction between fiction and fact is extraordinary: In the chapter "How to Tell a True War Story" in // [|The Things They Carried] //, O'Brien casts a distinction between "story-truth" (the truth of fiction) and "happening-truth" (the truth of fact or occurrence), writing that "story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth." Story truth is emotional truth; thus the feeling created by a fictional story is sometimes truer than what results from reading the facts. Certain sets of stories in // [|The Things They Carried] // seem to contradict each other, and certain stories are designed to "undo" the suspension of disbelief created in previous stories; for example, "Speaking of Courage" is followed by "Notes", which explains in what ways "Speaking of Courage" is fictional. O'Brien received the [|National Book Award] in 1979 for his book // [|Going After Cacciato] //.<span style="background-image: none; color: #0645ad; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1em; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[|[3]] His novel //In the Lake of the Woods// won the [|James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction] in 1995. His most recent novel is //July, July//. O'Brien's papers are housed at the [|Harry Ransom Center] at the [|University of Texas at Austin]. O’Brien writes and lives in central Texas, where he raises his young sons and teaches full-time every other year at [|Texas State University–San Marcos]. In alternate years, he teaches several workshops to MFA students in the creative writing program.<span style="background-image: none; color: #0645ad; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1em; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[|[1]][|[4]]
 * < **“** || Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. ||> **”** ||
 * <span style="display: block; font-size: smaller; font-style: normal; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0.4em; text-align: right; word-wrap: break-word;">—Tim O'Brien ||