The Things They Carried analysis paper Themes in The Things They Carried “In a story‚ which is a kind of dreaming‚ the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world‚” writes Tim O’Brien in his novel The Things They Carried (225). Throughout the story‚ O’Brien discusses themes such as death‚ the loss of innocence‚ and truth. Not only does O’Brien successfully thematically connect his final story “The Lives of the Dead” to the rest of his book‚ he also creates a “true war story‚” as
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People carry all kinds of things on the daily basis. From little things like car keys to a traumatic memory from the past. The soldiers who fought in the vietnam war had to go through many incredibly horrifying experiences and it was those exact events that make “The Things They carried” by Tim O’Brien such a marvellous vivid book. Tim O’Brien uses imagery‚ figurative language and repetition to get a ridiculous emotional connection with the reader. He uses story-telling to clear his conscious about
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but with imagery that make a story easier to picture it when reading it. When an author writes a story they need to use facts to make a good story‚ but they need to add things to make the readers picture what is happening‚ they make them think deeper about the story. An example of when this happens in The Things They Carried is when O’Brien is talking about Curt Lemons death‚ “I can see him turning looking back at Rat Kiley‚ then he laughed and took that curious half step from the shade into sunlight
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The excerpt of “The Things They Carried” inspired me to write about minimalism and the burden that excessive amounts of possessions can create and how ultimately it can weigh down an individual’s happiness. It inspired me to write about this topic by listing off all the things the soldiers in the story had to carry and how much each thing weighed. It made me think about how unhappy carrying the heavy equipment might have made each soldier and how unhappy I was with the things weighing me down. To
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purposes. In The Things They Carried‚ a novel about war stories in Vietnam‚ Tim O’Brien uses many recurring details to support the central theme of death and its impact on the characters and the way they execute things from there on. The impact of the many deaths in the novel involves modifying command‚ haunting of dead body details‚ and a want to change something from the past. The first body to drop in the novel is that of Ted Lavender. Ted Lavender was a petrified soldier‚ one that carried 34 rounds
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The Greatest Fear Is Not Death Have you ever thought of what decisions you might do if you did not care of what others might say about you? “The embarrassment must have turned a screw in his head”(84). Tim O’Brien the author of the novel “The Things They Carried” a novel that debates the topic of truth vs. fiction all through the end using a generative idea of a soldier but at the same time using experiences not to generalize war since according to O’Brien it’s almost impossible to generalize‚ a novel
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Dialectical Journals of The Things They Carried Idea/Stylistic aspect | Quotation | Response | Truth | “Among the men in Alpha Company‚ Rat had a reputation for exaggeration and overstatement‚ a compulsion to rev up the facts…it was normal procedure to discount sixty or seventy percent of anything he had to say.” | The narrator‚ in making a seemingly offhanded comment about Rat’s tendency to lie‚ reveals another major point of the novel: the truth of a particular story is differing from person
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The Things They Carried: Chapter 1 Significant Quote: “In the accompanying letter‚ Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline‚ precisely where the land touched the water at high tide‚ where things came together but also separated.” (8) Speaker: Tim O’Brien Audience: The reader Significance: This symbolizes Martha and Jimmy’s feelings for each other. They are separated by the war‚ but together in their minds. Questions: 1. What prompted the separate-but-together thought
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is The Things They Carried which was written by Tim O’Brien. The book is a bunch of connected short stories of a platoon of soldiers in the Vietnam War. The work is a piece of fiction that uses real names and includes the author himself as the protagonist. By doing this‚ the author meshes and blurs the non fiction in with the fiction‚ which makes the book feel like a war memoir. Overall‚ the book was interesting insight on the Vietnam War and a very good book to read. Reading The Things They Carried
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fraud‚ you reach your destination‚ but are unable to return” (Ghanaian proverb). What are the assumptions underlying this quote? How possible is it to undo the bad we do? This proverb describes one of the significant themes in The Things They Carried. It describes the mental and emotional burden the soldiers are forced to carry throughout their lives as a result of the atrocities they committed during the Vietnamese War. This proverb is assuming that the soldiers had in fact committed crimes
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