Things They Carried Rhetorical Analysis Essay

They Things They Carried
English 111 2pm

Tim O’Brien authored the novel “The Things They Carried” a novel filled with short stories about the Vietnam War. The first passage in the collection lists the numerous things the solders in O’Brien’s platoon carried. Varying from weapons, to thoughts of loved ones back home. Distorting the line between the tangible and intangible, O’Brien writes about the things like bibles, pantyhose, moccasins, and pictures. Things the men carried tangibly, but are used to give them something to think about other than the waning darkness of the war, that making them intangible. The intangible things are used to escape the war; weighing heavier than anything tangible possibly could. Specifically, they are burdened with death. The men carry the intangible burden of death, something always on their minds and weighing more than anything tangible they could ever carry. They did what they could not to acknowledge death, each using their own techniques try and put a spin on and lift the emotional baggage of war and war’s mortality. To truly understand the men’s view of death in the war, we must pay attention to
the stories. What words are chosen to describe a person’s death and how that person deals with the loss? Rat Kiley deals with his frustration about Curt Lemon’s death by brutally killing a water buffalo. They blame themselves like Lt. Cross, whose heaviest burden was Ted Lavender’s death. When Ted Lavender dies O’Brien writes “They carried al the emotional baggage of men who might die. Greif, terror, love, longing.” Lt. Cross believed that his loving of Martha more than his love for his men was the cause of death to Ted Lavender. In the story “Love” Lt. Cross said “he’d never forgiven himself for Lavenders death. It was something that will never go away.” After all those years, Lt. Cross still blamed himself for the death and carried that intangible burden with him. After the death of Lavender, Lt. Cross used the grief and responsibility of his death to make him self more focused to be a better leader for his men. Using the death to promote a better future for him and the men he loved. Another way to grieve was with a joke or two. After Ted Lavender is shot, for example, Sanders jokes that the “moral” of Ted Lavender’s accidental and tragic death is to stay away from drugs. Taking away from the death and making a joke about him instead. DE personifying the dead was not an insult to the departed but instead an alternative to dealing with the loss. “They used hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness.
Greased they’d say, offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn’t cruelty just stage presence. They were actors.” (Pg. 19) The way the men avoided really thinking about death. It was an ominous shadow of losing a member of the platoon. The men didn’t want to deal with the thoughts that surround death so they choose to lighten their attitudes toward it. Putting a spin on it. As noted in the book, “The war is like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put a fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.” (Pg. 31) The solders did all they could to escape the inedibility of death, though the emotional baggage stayed with them for the rest of their lives. O’Brien says that in Vietnam, the soldiers devised ways to make the dead seem less dead; they kept them alive with
stories.
Linda’s passing was the first time O’Brien had to deal with the pain of losing someone close to him. The way O’Brien looks at Linda’s body in the funeral home and then thinks with detachment that it looks different than he thought it would becomes O’Brien’s method for dealing with death for the rest of his life. In the closing story, “The Lives of the Dead,” O’Brien explains his view of death by juxtaposing his first encounter with death as a soldier with his first-ever experience with death when his friend Linda died of a brain tumor. In this particular story, O’Brien explains how memory and storytelling are comforts for times of mourning and how they have equipped him to deal with the painful thought of death. In this metaphor, he considers how his need to tell stories while daydreaming of Linda after her death. He is optimistic that the power of memory in storytelling gives immortality to both the one who has died. O’Brien uses this same technique to cope with his traumatic past losing those he cared about at Vietnam. “I learned that words make a difference. It’s easier to cope with a kicked bucket than a corpse; if it isn’t human it doesn’t matter much if it’s dead.” (Pg. 226) O’Brien uses the last story to tie in the tone he uses for death. He talks about Linda, a girl he knew, as a child that gave him is first experience with death.