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“The lives of the dead” by Tim O’Brien
“The lives of the dead” is a short story in memoir form by Tim O’Brien from his book
The Things They Carried. He talks about his childhood sweetheart Linda who passed
away when she was nine years old due to a brain tumor. He blends her death with the
dead people he encountered fighting in Vietnam. As a child he wished Linda to live again
in his night dreams. In this way, he felt the dead would never be forgotten. As long as
someone can remember them and their stories, then the dead never really die. He
mentioned several times in the narrative that he loved her beyond the physical. Even
though he never mentions anything about physical contact between them; their love was
platonic and sacred.
In “The Lives of the Dead”, the author reveals that we feed the flame of our deepest
desires for people through self-hypnosis, especially in trying circumstances. We like to
muse over the people we love and thus indirectly bring them back to life because we think
about them. O’Brien tries to bring Linda and her story back to life and his fellow soldiers
on either side of the Vietnam war whose dead remains he had encountered.