"Spring into Action"

Both The Things They Carried and Maus share the idea that war stories shouldn’t be really about the war but more about the stories, the memories, the story telling, and the effects it has had on them. Throughout the novel, The Things They Carried does not really describe the war itself, but describes the people and their experiences during and after the war, and yet it is still a war story. Similarly, Maus does not describe the war itself but describes how the war is affecting his father Vladek, his mother Anja, and the rest of his family and friends. It describes how they are surviving, where they had to hide, and how people were being affected. Both describe the horrors that come from the effects of war.

Another way they are similar is the way the stories are formatted. Tim O’Brien is telling a fictional story where he is a narrator and at one part he is the telling the story through the character Tim who hears the story from Rat Kiley who hears the story from someone else. Similarly, Art is telling the story of his parents and is referencing parts of the novel that has already passed such as the mice who hung themselves towards the end of the first part. Both are very metafiction.

Both stories talk about the effects of war without really discussing the events of the war itself which reminded me of the “Spring into Action,” when compressed it’s very small and when pulling it, it is very long. The actual war itself is described briefly, but the effects are very long lasting and have longer descriptions.