Things They Carried Critical Analysis

I disliked the book, The Things They Carried, more than I can say I liked it. It wasn’t because I’m not into reading books or stories about war, but because I loathed the gruesomeness of certain scenes. The scene that got to me the most was the event of Curt Lemon’s death, and how Rat Kiley felt about the whole ordeal. Not only was Lemon’s death traumatic to think of, but also the misery and torture of the baby water buffalo, which was quite disturbing to read. The scene was also interesting to me though, to think of how readers react when a human is killed, versus when an animal is killed, and how deeply one human feels for another.
Not only was was the chapter of Lemon’s death extreme, but also the death of Kiowa. Since Kiowa was a close friend of O’Brien’s, it’s painful to read through how Norman Bowker feels as though it was himself to blame for not saving the other. The stories that are told in the book tend to meet with some sort of disaster most of the time, the characters tend to seem broken down, as there isn’t a very happy, or exciting part without something awful happening soon after. The death
It was good, but it was also a gut wrenching story about the war in Vietnam. I liked how the book opened with the author describing the physical things they carried during the war, and how he ended the book with them carrying emotions and memories out from it. Although many characters died in multiple different ways, it seems like there were all there to serve a specific point and feeling, from regret to sorrow. I enjoyed some of Tim O’Brien’s writing styles as well, since I don’t see some of that in the books I read, from the beginning where there were no quotation marks, to later on when he kept multiple paragraphs together as one. It was definitely an interesting book to read, full of so many unspoken emotions, writing styles and choices, and leaving the reader to guess at the end of what all hadn’t been spoken