Summary Of Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried, a novel by Tim O’Brien, is a collection of war stories told from a fictional Vietnam veteran’s perspective. O’Brien elucidates the physical and emotional barrier war creates between men and women to help demonstrate the frustration soldiers have with women in war.
O’Brien illustrates the physical and emotional barrier Vietnam creates between men and women. The letters soldiers write to their girlfriends in the United States demonstrate the physical barrier between the two genders. O’Brien describes a soldier’s relationship with a girl in America: “First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey” (O’Brien 1). Vietnam physically separates men from
As O’Brien describes what the medics think of Mary Anne, he writes, “The men genuinely liked her. Out on the volleyball court she wore cut-off blue jeans and a black swimsuit top, which the guys appreciated, and in the evenings she liked to dance to music from Rat’s portable tape-deck (O’Brien 91).” The soldiers primarily appreciate Mary Anne for her physical appearance. When she first arrives, they are not concerned with who she is as a person whatsoever. When Mary Anne displays her body on the volleyball court, the men view her as a sexual object with no feelings or opinions. They simply enjoy the fact that she provides them with something pleasing to look at: her body. Most women, excluding Mary Anne, do not serve as agents in the novel because they are seen as sexual objects who are not capable of initiating action. When Mary Anne does serve as an agent, she subsequently turns savage. O’Brien describes Mary Anne after she returns from a two week mission with the Green Berets: “There was no emotion in [Mary Anne’s] stare, no sense of the person behind it. But the grotesque part, he said, was her jewelry. At the girl’s throat was a necklace of human tongues (O’Brien 105).” Most likely, Rat Kiley creates this story to show that women and war do not
As the character Tim O’Brien describes his frustration with an old woman for not understanding his war story, the author writes,“I’ll picture Rat Kiley’s face, his grief, and I’ll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn’t listening. It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story” (O’Brien 81). The old woman does not understand the purpose of the baby buffalo story. She thinks it supposed to convey a feeling of sadness and pity for the buffalo, but O’Brien makes clear that its purpose is to demonstrate Rat Kiley’s love for Curt Lemon. The woman cannot understand the real truth of the baby buffalo story because she did not experience the war. Only a soldier could relate to the feeling of losing a comrade, and the old woman does not understand that the men felt for Rat Kiley more than for the buffalo. A soldier or veteran can try his best to tell a story that emotes the truth of an event or sequence of events, but sometimes only another soldier can comprehend the true meaning of a story. After Curt Lemon’s death, Rat Kiley writes a letter to Lemon’s sister, and O’Brien summarizes what Kiley