This article is driven by the urgency of the current ecological situation and humanity’s role
in its development. It explores the ways in which nature, humanity, and the relationship between
the two are negotiated in Tim O’Brien’s collection of short stories The Things They Carried (1990).
Close readings of key passages show that through use of anthropomorphisms nature is portrayed as
active rather than passive, and that the soldiers are, on the one hand, alienated and removed from
US society and, on the other, embedded within nature. As a result, the human-nature dualism is
exposed as a reductive, hierarchical, and separatist approach to a multifaceted, complex relation
between interacting, equally valuable entities. The analysis of prevalent themes and devices—
including anthropomorphisms, temporal non-linearity, decentering and fragmentation of the
individual, and the omnipresence of death as well as the narrator’s preoccupation with mortality—
provides a blueprint for an ecocritical reading of postwar literature. This approach values nature in
itself and generates an understanding of the ways in which the anthropocentric worldview prevalent
in the Western world encourages a misinformed and harmful attitude towards nature. |