Tim O Brien's The Things They Carry Analysis

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The Vietnam war was fought from the years 1955 to 1975. During this twenty-year war, fifty-eight thousand Americans lost their lives. The author Tim O’ Brien was one of the lucky ones to live to tell about it in his writing. He wrote many short stories about his time in the war and the collection of short stories named “The Things They Carried” has been the most popular. Tim O’ Brien’s Fictional Short story “The Things They Carried,” explores O’ Brien’s use of imagery, symbolism, and metaphor to reveal to the reader that the things military personnel carry are not always tangible. The definition of what they carry is defined many ways in the story. O’ Brien goes from talking about the literal things they carry to the metaphorical things they …show more content…

All of the things have an actual value of weight but this idea of weight is symbolic of something else. This is just one example of the many times he talks about weight, “The weapon weighed 7.5 pounds unloaded, 8.2 pounds with its full 20-round magazine. Depending on numerous factors, such as topography and psychology, the riflemen carried anywhere from 12 to 20 magazines, usually in cloth bandoliers, adding on another 8.4 pounds at minimum, 14 pounds at maximum” (O’ Brien 4). In this quote, O’ Brien uses these four tangible weight amounts to get the reader to ask themselves if there is also a symbolic meaning to the weight he is talking about. The symbolic meaning to the weight he is talking about is life. Of all the things they are carrying, the heaviest and most important thing they are carrying is lives of each other. The death of Ted Lavender in the story shows that the weight of Lavender’s death was heavily upon the shoulders of Jimmy Cross. O’ Brien reveals to the reader that Cross feels guilty about his death. O’ Brien writes this when Cross is burning letters and pictures of his girlfriend, “Lavender was dead. You couldn’t burn the blame” (16). Jimmy Cross was able to get over the girl he loved back home, but he was never able to get rid of the guilt he felt for Lavender’s death. It can be inferred that Cross will carry that guilt with him for the rest of his

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