Happiness In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried
Happiness is a choice... or is it? The answer isn’t that simple. Everyday people go through hardships and suffer from internal wars that make it impossible to just choose happiness. This makes it important for people to practice different coping mechanisms for people to understand and internalize their emotions. Tim O’Brien expands upon this idea of coping with hardships in his novel The Things They Carried. With the setting taking place on the battlefield of the vietnam war, the way these men cope becomes one of the most prominent motifs in this novel. Every man in The Things They Carried has a different way of coping with the ramifications of war. This makes O’brien’s The Things They Carried the perfect read to analyze and understand how
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O’Brien uses Kiley’s character, along with others, to show how unhealthy it is to repress your emotions and simply ignore reality. “Thank God for Rat Kiley. Every so often, maybe four times altogether, he trotted back to check me out. Which took courage. It was a wild fight, guys running and laying down fire… but Rat Kiley took the risks”(page 180). As a medic Rat Kiley is constantly playing the hero, crossing through gunfire to attend to his soldiers’ wounds. Consistently repressing his emotions and fear it comes with no surprise that Kiley suffers from a psychotic break. In the chapter Night Life, the war becomes too much for Rat Kiley.“Rat Kiley finally hit a wall. He couldn’t sleep during the hot daylight hours; he couldn’t cope with nights”(page 211). It becomes clear that Kiley never learned how to deal with his emotions and slowly broke down until he shot himself in the foot. The war took too much of a toll on him and without adopting any coping mechanisms he resulted to physically hurting himself to get out of the war.
In life we don’t get to select our path. What happens to us is completely out of our hands. We can’t even choose what makes us feel whole again. While happiness isn’t exactly a choice, learning to cope with adversity is a start. In the novel The Things They Carried, some men like Rat Kiley could not deal the emotions war inflicts and drove themselves insane. Likewise, the young girl knew how to handle her emotions and was able to survive the loss of her loved ones. Life isn’t always about your given circumstances, but the way you react to them. Coping is one of the few things we can still
O’Brien uses Kiley’s character, along with others, to show how unhealthy it is to repress your emotions and simply ignore reality. “Thank God for Rat Kiley. Every so often, maybe four times altogether, he trotted back to check me out. Which took courage. It was a wild fight, guys running and laying down fire… but Rat Kiley took the risks”(page 180). As a medic Rat Kiley is constantly playing the hero, crossing through gunfire to attend to his soldiers’ wounds. Consistently repressing his emotions and fear it comes with no surprise that Kiley suffers from a psychotic break. In the chapter Night Life, the war becomes too much for Rat Kiley.“Rat Kiley finally hit a wall. He couldn’t sleep during the hot daylight hours; he couldn’t cope with nights”(page 211). It becomes clear that Kiley never learned how to deal with his emotions and slowly broke down until he shot himself in the foot. The war took too much of a toll on him and without adopting any coping mechanisms he resulted to physically hurting himself to get out of the war.
In life we don’t get to select our path. What happens to us is completely out of our hands. We can’t even choose what makes us feel whole again. While happiness isn’t exactly a choice, learning to cope with adversity is a start. In the novel The Things They Carried, some men like Rat Kiley could not deal the emotions war inflicts and drove themselves insane. Likewise, the young girl knew how to handle her emotions and was able to survive the loss of her loved ones. Life isn’t always about your given circumstances, but the way you react to them. Coping is one of the few things we can still