Stories as a Method of Keeping Alive Both the Dead and the Living: Tim O’Brien’s “The Lives of the Dead”

Tim O’Brien closes his novel, The Things They Carried, with a short story titled “The Lives of the Dead.” In this short story, O’Brien relates a final cohesive statement concerning the art of storytelling in conjunction with the relationships between the physically dead and those still living. In this conveyance, O’Brien speaks not only of the trauma and death so prevalent in war, but the death and loss that happen to all people as a part of the human condition. In “The Lives of the Dead,” he does this by not only relaying stories of Vietnam but also stories of his childhood love, Linda. In this way, the story illustrates how death touches everyone. This short story also elaborates on the function of writing about personal experiences with death and how it serves O’Brien as an integral process in dealing with loss. To that end, “The Lives of the Dead” work to examine the importance and power of stories in keeping the dead alive and breathing which, by extension, allow the living to overcome death and continue living.

O’Brien uses language to dissect his experiences, resulting in a storytelling technique that allows him to work through and come to terms with the difficulties that he has faced and still plague him; the act of writing represents a form of mental escapism that helps comfort him by keeping alive a feeling of connection with comrades and loves lost. “In a story I can steal her soul. I can revive, at least briefly, that which is absolute and unchanging. It’s not the surface that matters, it’s the identity that lives inside. In a story… She can reach out, touch my wrist, and say ‘Timmy, stop crying’” (O’Brien 242). After the death of his young love, Linda, O’Brien’s subconscious takes over and initiates a coping mechanism in which O’Brien allows his mind to create stories of Linda alive and well. Linda talks to him and touches him, which comforts the still living O’Brien in the face of a striking loss. The acute and overwhelming harshness of reality is anesthetized and solaced by the unreal. In this way, the layered story O’Brien paints in “The Lives of the Dead” –– of Linda, of the dead Vietnamese man –– act as devices to help him confront important life events.

Stories live on, even if bodies do not; by writing down his memories of the dead Vietnamese man and Linda, his childhood love, O’Brien simultaneously memorializes them and confronts his own mortality in the context of others’ mortality. “Once you’re alive, you can’t ever be dead… .And as a writer now, I want to save Linda’s life. Not her body –– her life” (O’Brien 236). In this chapter, O’Brien pronounces that stories are a way to memorialize and pay respect to the dead. Still, he continues by suggesting that memorials serve to benefit the living more so than they do the dead. Memorials represent the symbolic intersection where life and death meet and serve the purpose of comforting and consoling those still living –– the people who actually experience the loss. As such, this story at once breathes life into the memories of Linda and of lost comrades, acting as a medium through which he can figure out the act of moving on and living out his life. Thus, revisiting his past and organizing them into a story represents a therapeutic exercise for O’Brien that pushes him to confront his ghosts.

Ultimately, the purpose of the “The Lives of the Dead” is to underscore and exemplify the ability of a story to not only remember the dead and bring the living comfort, but also to save the lives of the living by reminding them that they can and should practice peace and acceptance, even in the dreadful face of death. In this way, fiction helps the individual overcome the mental and emotional strictures that death breeds. “I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades…and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story” (O’Brien 246). The story ends with the final conclusion that O’Brien’s present uses writing and stories as a means to save his past. In this way, he asserts that the story does not merely keep the dead alive but keeps him alive as well. The story is his attempt at saving his own life. It is as if every chapter he writes symbolizes the confrontation and closure that he experiences in regards to particular experiences throughout this life –– the experience of seeing death for the first time in the form of Linda, and for the second time in the form of the dead Vietnamese man, both of which pushed him into an unsettling and haunting realm. In this way, the implementation of language and storytelling as a coping mechanism is helpful insomuch that, once O’Brien is able to reconcile his own emotions with the occurrences of events past, revisiting these precious memories and precious people provides a comforting familiarity and imparts a certain amount of meaning on the story and the individuals that they revive.

Tim O’Brien’s “The Lives of the Dead” discusses his personal method of confronting not only war, but also himself and death as a universal reality. He uses the story to commemorate the dead, but the story necessarily relates back to his own perceptions of the dead and his relationship to the individuals. Thus, this short story reflects the notion that each individual exists only in relation to the people that they surround themselves with. The bodies of the dead may be gone, but they continue to live out many lives in the memories and stories of others still living. In the case of O’Brien, this story allows him to find comfort in the belief that writing holds the power to overcome the finality of the deaths of people he cares about.

Work Cited

O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. 1st. Mariner Books, 2009.