Ambiguity In The Things They Carried

Even though the science strives for objectivity, the facts and numbers never speak to us so as real human stories can. Many historical events would not be comprehensible to us without such reference to individual experience. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a dazzling example of the writing that shows us the reverse side of the Vietnam War.

The book demonstrates that despite the inspired and ardent rhetoric of the President and the government, the soldiers themselves were far less committed to the proclaimed goals of the war. Throughout the text of the book, we see how the soldiers march and do what they are ordered to do. However, the impression stays that they function automatically, like machines, without thinking much about the

In this part of the book, O’Brien tells how he murdered an enemy and describes his subsequent meditations. Thinking about the killed Vietnamese man, O’Brien does not refer to him as the enemy. For the narrator, he is just another human being that was alive and then was murdered, and the party for which he fought does not matter. In fact, there are much more similarities between the killer and the killed than one may think. As O’Brien ponders the life of the killed Vietnamese, he writes: “He would have been taught that to defend the land was a man's highest duty and highest privilege. He had accepted this. It was never open to question. Secretly, though, it also frightened him. He was not a fighter” (O'Brien, 1990, p. 79). As we have learned from the previous chapters, this can be said about the narrator as well. In the end, we see that there are two men, neither of which wanted to go to war and to kill; nonetheless, one kills another one. Trying to soothe O’Brien, Kiowa says that it is a war; the murdered man had a weapon, and Tim had no other choice except for killing him. Nonetheless, his words do not seem to relieve the distress of O’Brien. He keeps looking at the dead body and all its wounds as well as the small blue flowers behind his head. Such staring is obsessive, just like imagining the life that the killed man could have had; it is the consequence of apathy that gripped