Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried: An Analysis

The idea of war brings up many questions about life and death, suffering, and consequences. While many people may see war as something that affects people as a whole, such as nations or a persecuted group, war further impacts every individual, whether or not they are directly involved. War limits freedoms and individualism, and in most cases people find themselves with less rights than during peacetime. People base their choices not on what they feel, and more on what they have to do to survive. Soldiers and civilians alike are influenced by war in different ways, however, these tie together when the overall effects of war are examined. In the novel All the Light We Cannot See, the effect of war on to individuals is analyzed– one a civilian,
The author, Tim O’Brien, is deployed into the Vietnam war when he is a young man. Throughout the novel, the effects of the war on him are shown and they are profound, he has seen death and suffering; he has he seen death but he has also been the cause of it. He describes everything in the war and the effect that it had on him personally and how it continues to affect him in the present. In the beginning of the novel, O’Brien describes everything the other soldiers carry with them. This is his way of showing that the war is personal to everyone. Based on what each of the soldiers carry with them, he is able to understand their fears and what is important to them. This concept is demonstrated when O’Brien says, “It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.” This quote exemplifies the impacts of war on a person’s individualism by saying that during strife, people only did what they thought they had to in order to remain alive. Their own thoughts and ideas mattered less than surviving. Throughout the novel, especially when the author speaks of the present day, it is clear that he is still affected by what he experienced Vietnam War. He is continually influenced by the death and horror that he experienced. His own personal trauma, including when he was shot, impacts his present life as a veteran. The effects of the war on him
Damage from the harsh environment people are forced into during strife is shattering, and, ultimately, irreversible. The ongoing parasitic effects of warfare on a person’s psyche can be compared to fractals of broken glass spearing throughout their consciousness. Their broken mind and broken life in turn affects all the people around