The Reality Of Death In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

The Reality of Death Dealing with the death of a loved one is one of life's most challenging obstacles. The pain and suffering that a person goes through cannot be fully understood unless experienced firsthand, like people that have experienced death through abortion. However, for some who have experienced death in war, death is something more like a game, where it is feared, yet made fun of in hopes of lessening the truth of reality. In the short story, “The Things They Carried”, by Tim O’Brian, the author demonstrates his attempts to make death less real through tactics like telling stories about the dead as if they were living, joking about zombies and conceiving the dead as items instead of people. In the story "The Things They Carried,"

The things that the soldiers carry with them are both physical and intangible items and what these things are depends upon the individual soldier. They carry the basic "necessities" for survival (although how anyone can consider such things as M&M's a necessity is a mystery to many) and the bare minimum to in order to survive as long as possible, because “ultimately, trying to stay alive long enough to return home in one piece was the only thing that made any sense to them.” (The Underlying…) The men carry memories in their hearts, as well as fears. The weight of these abstract items is as real as that of any physical ones, and unlike those physical objects, they are not so easily thrown away. The story shows how through war, the value of life can be very complex. The thumb that Norman Bowker carried, for example, “was dark brown, rubbery to the touch, and weighed 4 ounces at [the] most. It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen.” Sanders, another person in

In the poem “The Mother”, by Gwendolyn Brooks, the author shows how a mother who has had an abortion expresses herself about the life of her unborn child. Abortion is a very delicate topic to cover, but nonetheless, the feelings that the mother portrayed through the poem are undeniable and true. The woman in the poem lets the reader know that “Abortions will not let [anyone] forget.” The mother realizes that even though she has stopped the life of a person and that time has gone by, she has no intentions of forgetting what she has done, and will face the reality, even if it pains her. This proves that just because someone has decided to make a decision that some might find questionable, it does not mean that the person making the decision will find some way to pretend it didn’t happen, or find a way to joke around about the matter in order to make it seem like it’s not a big deal. This could be the result of not being exposed to a violent environment, as well as many other factors, some of which, cannot be controlled, and are