Content Category
Literary Criticism
Abstract/Description
Elements of Vietnam’s ecology in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried dismantle former understandings of gender and racial identity. While traditional perceptions of wartime ecologies hold these spaces among the most heavily decimated, damaged, and disfigured on earth, the opposite occurs in O’Brien’s Vietnam. Observing how a land burdened by the destruction of a human war dominates these human forms of identity raises interesting questions regarding the level of control that humans possess over their own identity.
While critical discourse investigating landscapes and the environment in The Things They Carried primarily construe these spaces as mere symbolic topographies of terror and exile, my presentation avoids purely human-centric interpretations of wartime landscapes in order to interrogate the nature and mutability of these constructs within an actual ecology rather than within a figurative or imagined landscape. By relying on more current theories of ecocriticism, such as ecological agency and multispecies theory, I argue that the power to shape human identity is held by the more-than-human ecology of war rather than by humans alone. Traditionally disadvantaged social constructs, such as non-white race and femininity, as well as traditionally advantageous social labels of white and male, disappear within a war landscape not through symbolic or figurative means but through biological processes. These processes include excremental decomposition and interactions with nonhuman lifeforms like animals and plants. The erasure of these human social identities enables the creation of new ecological identities that provide the freedom which the purely human forms restricted. The ecological revision of these human forms of identity within The Things They Carried ultimately environmentalizes one of the novel’s primary concepts, the nature of a soldier, transforming a soldier from a human representative of a military to an ambiguously-human life form within war’s unexpectedly harmonious and interdependent ecosystem.
Copyright and Licensing of My Content
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Origin of Submission
as part of a class
Faculty Involvement
Jamin Rowan and Brian Roberts
No-Man’s . . . or Women’s-Land: Ecological Power over Human Identity in The Things They Carried
Elements of Vietnam’s ecology in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried dismantle former understandings of gender and racial identity. While traditional perceptions of wartime ecologies hold these spaces among the most heavily decimated, damaged, and disfigured on earth, the opposite occurs in O’Brien’s Vietnam. Observing how a land burdened by the destruction of a human war dominates these human forms of identity raises interesting questions regarding the level of control that humans possess over their own identity.
While critical discourse investigating landscapes and the environment in The Things They Carried primarily construe these spaces as mere symbolic topographies of terror and exile, my presentation avoids purely human-centric interpretations of wartime landscapes in order to interrogate the nature and mutability of these constructs within an actual ecology rather than within a figurative or imagined landscape. By relying on more current theories of ecocriticism, such as ecological agency and multispecies theory, I argue that the power to shape human identity is held by the more-than-human ecology of war rather than by humans alone. Traditionally disadvantaged social constructs, such as non-white race and femininity, as well as traditionally advantageous social labels of white and male, disappear within a war landscape not through symbolic or figurative means but through biological processes. These processes include excremental decomposition and interactions with nonhuman lifeforms like animals and plants. The erasure of these human social identities enables the creation of new ecological identities that provide the freedom which the purely human forms restricted. The ecological revision of these human forms of identity within The Things They Carried ultimately environmentalizes one of the novel’s primary concepts, the nature of a soldier, transforming a soldier from a human representative of a military to an ambiguously-human life form within war’s unexpectedly harmonious and interdependent ecosystem.