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.…
what's to come. Shame of why they are at the war. Others carry guilt for allowing the death of a fellow…
Tim O’Brien is a very gifted author, but he is also a veteran of the Vietnam War and fought with the United States in that controversial war. Tim O’Brien was drafted into the Vietnam War in 1968. He served as an infantryman, and obtained the rank of sergeant and won a Purple Heart after being wounded by shrapnel. He was discharged from the Vietnam War in 1970. I believe that O’Brien’s own images and past experiences he encountered in the Vietnam War gave him inspiration to write the story “The Things They Carried.” O’Brien tells the story in third person narrative form about Lt. Jimmy Cross and his platoon of young American men in the Vietnam War. In “The Things They Carried” we can see differences and similarities between the characters…
The short story “The Things They Carried,” written by Tim O'Brien, presented the conflicts as two different plotlines which eventually interrelate. A personal problem Jimmy Cross held was his one-way love for a girl back home named Martha. Although Cross was certain Martha would never return his affection, Martha distracted his mind all throughout his mission in Vietnam. In addition, Jimmy cross held the responsibility of keeping his men safe as First Lieutenant. Because most of the storyline offered information about the routines of the men and the basic equipment they carried, it is safe to conclude the author, Tim O’Brien, did not seek to follow the Freytag pyramid work.…
In the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien there were many characters that could be considered a “lead character” but by far First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross was the character who demonstrated an enormous amount of leadership, courage, and determination. Throughout the story it is difficult to see where First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross gathers his strength from. In the beginning of the short story, he seems very strong but towards the end of the story he also seems to still be gathering strength from somewhere. Due to Cross having immense feelings and connections to the world outside of the war, he is unable to focus on his men and his surroundings. So much so that he has a man killed on his watch, to which he feels undeniable grief and responsibility towards. Martha was his link to helping him stay out of the war, mentally and emotionally. All of his emotions and thoughts lay with her, lay with all she symbolized of leaving behind and all he wanted to return home to. That is why throughout the story “Martha never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy take care of yourself.” was so important and valid. That statement all throughout the book showed she was not involved in the war, in his hardships across seas, just in seeing his was safe in what he was doing. She helped and hindered his day to day duties.…
The title of Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, paints a vague mental image of people carrying something – an image that is not yet complete for the reader to grasp the purpose of the novel. ‘Things’ are often assumed to be physical, in this novel, the ‘things’ that the soldiers carried were the mental burdens during and after the Vietnam War. Through the use of narratives of the different soldiers, O’Brien is able to follow each characters physical and mental weight that they carried. The…
Many people, in some point in their lives will experience a death of a loved one and will try to cope with it as best as they can. In “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien talks about his war stories and how he and the soldiers handled the deaths of the soldiers while at war. The soldiers had to deal with the stress, sadness, and guilt when seeing their partner get killed. O’Brien talks about the different coping mechanisms the soldiers use when facing the death of a fellow comadre. The soldiers tell jokes, write letters, tell stories, take responsibility of their death, and even reenact the death scene.…
The Vietnam War was a war of great ambiguity. Flowered up with the illusive ideas of heroism and triumph, millions of America's innocent youth were drafted to fight a war in Vietnam. The consequences for this war were grave and dire. Millions from both sides lost their lives for a seemingly unreasonable cause. In his novel "The Things They Carried", Tim O'Brien changes the glorified way in which media and textbooks portray war, telling gruesome stories illustrating the irreparable damage war inflicts on the lives of young soldiers. The "things" the characters carry both concrete and emotional. Woefully, the ladder catapults the men into a lifetime of struggling to cope with the crushing weight of guilt, grief, and haunting memories that cannot be unloaded.…
In “The Things They Carried,” a short story by Tim O’Brien, the reader is able to see, in great detail, each of the characters ways of dealing with the atrocities of the Vietnam War by what they choose to carry; how symbolically they use these objects as a means for remembrance of what they have left behind, to escape what they deal with each day, and for some, a false sense of security and/or control over the violence and death that surrounds them.…
There are many different controversies on the information in “The Things They Carried”. Some believe to tell a good story, there's only facts and no truth, but some think that there needs to be all fictional elements and no facts to make a good story. A majority of people say that an excellent story starts with facts and adds in other elements like metaphors, symbolism, and imagery because visualizing the story helps the reader connect to the unfamiliar event.…
The Vietnam War was a long costly armed conflict that wounded the U.S. The communist regime of North Vietnam was a war fought by the Viet Cong against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The war was increasingly unpopular at home it ended with the withdrawal of U.S. forces. More than 3 million people, including 58,000 Americans, were killed in the conflict. Tim O’Brien the author of “The Things They Carried” is book that recounts his own experience in the Vietnam War and allows him to give a vivid description on the war. He enters the war as scared young man. The war leaves a guilt-ridden middle-aged man who tells stories about Vietnam in order to cope with his painful memories. O’Brien uses imagery and symbolism in order to…
The novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a book about the Vietnam War. In this novel O’Brien takes a main focus on the emotional and physical weight that the soldiers carry. In the beginning of the story O’Brien focuses on the physical components of what the soldiers carry, along with the sentimental value of the things they carry. Such as Jimmy Cross carrying the pictures of Martha, pebbles from Martha, and Henry Dobbins carrying his girlfriend’s panty hose around his neck. Toward the middle of the novel Tim O’Brien mentions the emotional toll that killing other soldiers has on the soldiers. He tells us the thoughts that go through the soldiers heads and how each death impacts them the most. He also talks about the questions that the soldiers have after they kill another soldier, such as, what life they live back home. By the end of…
In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien shares some of his chilling experiences in the Vietnam War using a rather unconventional form. He writes war stories and most of the ones in this…
In the novel, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien not only are there many cases of lost innocence but there are many other complications that come with it. The novel itself is stated to be a fiction novel, but in many examples it shows that Tim O’Brien himself had a personal connection to the stories told. This leaves us with the idea that just like his character, Tim O’Brien was using storytelling to combat his experiences in the Vietnam War. It seems as though O’Brien has a lot of themes that contradict themselves, such as; what is happening truth and story truth, loss of innocence and imagining it is still there, courage and cowardice, and guilt versus redemption. These are many themes found throughout the novel, they all prove that it is not just the physical things that these young men carried during the war, but one of the heaviest things these men carried were their emotional burdens.…
A 21-year-old man by the name of Tom O’Brien was drafted into the American War in Vietnam merely one month after graduating from college. Tom speaks of his journey of living with the shame of events that took place the summer of 1968. War to Tom is sickening and revolting; there was no unity or purpose. The 1960’s were a period of social disturbance with both the feminist and the civil rights movements occurring. In addition, the United States’ was divided by those who agreed and those who did not agree with the US’s involvement in the Vietnam war. When he received his inauguration, Tom was trapped and felt hopeless. “All around me the options seemed to be narrowing, as if I were hurtling down a huge black funnel, the whole world squeezing in tight. There was no…