Joining the Past to the Future: The Autobiographical Self in The Things They Carried

This paper seeks to highlight the critical role of affect in the construction of narrative by raising parallels between Tim O’Brien’s metafictional renderings of memory, imagination, and storytelling in The Things They Carried and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s models of human cognition. Literary narrative has long been associated with the ability to communicate emotional experiences, and recent developments in neuroscience have shown that emotions and affect are tied not only to basic functions of life management but also higher-order cognitive processes. Taken together, O’Brien and Damasio’s work demonstrates how narrative facilitates cultural learning and is therefore essential to survival and well-being.