Nearly all the stories in The Things They Carried are written from the first-person point of view of a single narrator, who is referred to by name as Tim O’Brien, the same name as the author of the book. The narrator grows throughout the stories from a recent college graduate conflicted about going to war, to an inexperienced soldier, to someone made emotionally cold by the war, to the writer of the stories. It is, perhaps, the role of a writer looking back on the war that the narrator most frequently occupies.

In “Along the Rainy River,” the narrator portrays himself as morally conflicted about his impending draft. He regards himself as cowardly for submitting to the expectations of others and going to war. When he kills a man along a trail in Vietnam, he feels considerable guilt. After he is removed from the war, he feels isolated from the men with whom he served and enacts petty revenge on a medic who mistreats a gunshot wound. However, the words the narrator utters the most often are, “I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now” (213). In this way, The Things They Carried is as much about the narrator’s experience as a writer, as it is about the war itself.