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The things they carried theme of death
Themes in the things they carried
Symbols and metaphors in the story the things they carried
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The title of the book itself couldn’t be more fitting. The Things They Carried is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Tim O'Brien about soldiers trying to live through the Vietnam War. These men deal with many struggles and hardships. Throughout this essay I will provide insight into three of the the numerous themes seen throughout the novel: burdens, truth, and death.
The first theme is the most prevalent of them all. Literally, the things they carried. The soldiers carried physical burdens of course but they carried something even heavier. They carried internal burdens. Many burdens are obvious in every soldier in the story, such as guilt. The character that feels the most guilt is Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. “Lieutenant Cross felt the pain. He blamed himself” (page 14). As the leader of the platoon, Jimmy Cross feels the weight brought by death of a soldier the closest. As the leader he believes it is his fault when a soldier dies. Cross falls into a depression due to the weight of the guilt he feels. Not all the weight may seem as heavy as guilt but there are many other burdens. Another being self image. Most of the soldiers carried this burden as well. The burden shows its great effect when Curt Lemon is about to be checked by the Dentist. Before the Dentist can even lay a finger on Lemon, he faints. This exposed a weak side in Lemon that he didn’t want anyone in the troop to see. Later that night Lemon went to the Dentist’s tent and demanded that his tooth be pulled due to a killer toothache. Even though the Dentist saw nothing wrong with the tooth, he pulled it out. Lemon was able to look like he never had a fear in front of the other soldiers (pronoun- he, antecedent- Lemon). Lemon was so desperate to save...
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... now. In the final chapter, the platoon searched through a burned down village and some of them came across some corpses. “Rat Kiley bent over the corpse. “Gimme five,” he said,” (page 149). Kiley gave the corpse a high five!?! The soldiers are no longer normal people. Their attitude toward death is literally considered insane. The characters react to death in a multitude of ways in the novel. O’Brien showed the impact war has on our minds with an extreme subject such as death.
O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried layering themes on top of themes, but what makes it amazing is the way he presents these themes. Every single one intertwined with another. Burdens. Truth. Death. The soldiers carried their burdens and the death of their friends and enemies, and they live on as storytellers telling their war stories, but can there really be a true war story?
In the book “The Things They Carried” four female characters played an important role in the lives of the men. Whether imaginary or not, they showed the power that women could have over men. Though it's unknown if the stories of these women are true or not, they still make an impact on the lives of the soldiers and the main narrator.
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a very uniquely written book. This book is comprised of countless stories that, though are out of order, intertwine and capture the reader’s attention through the end of the novel. This book, which is more a collection of short stories rather than one story that has a beginning and an end, uses a format that will keep the reader coming back for more.
By allowing the reader the "[privilege of] the soldiers experience" (Chattarji) it shows how difficult it is to get rid of the weight as begins to define you and the more it becomes a part of a person the harder it is to remove an aspect of yourself. In his repetition, O'Brien wants to give readers a deeper meaning into the everyday struggles of soldiers. He portrays the ways that soldiers were effected in the war and focused on the burdens that developed. O'Brien highlights how war changes those involved as "[the individual dreams of soldiers rise and fall and] their hopes riddled by disillusionment, their fantasies broken by shrapnel edged realities" (Timmeran). Wartime altered soldier’s perception and caused them to develop these emotional and physical weights that followed them for years. When many solider returned they were now stuck with daily burdens that had started since the day they landed in Vietnam. Constantly, these soldiers endured the long lasting results of participating in the war and unable to escape or forget the weight that they endure. "The Things They Carried" serves as a constant reminder to readers about the true realities of soldiers and the impact of war. How soldiers are not stable as they return home because of these weights that have become a part of them and how simple acts such as carrying around a weapon has now manifested itself into an emotional burden that will not leave. Often the realities of being a soldier are not portrayed accurately but O'Brien attempts to put into perspective what it really is like to go through warfare by drawing on his own experiences as a foot
Written by author Tim O’Brien after his own experience in Vietnam, “The Things They Carried” is a short story that introduces the reader to the experiences of soldiers away at war. O’Brien uses potent metaphors with a third person narrator to shape each character. In doing so, the reader is able to sympathize with the internal and external struggles the men endure. These symbolic comparisons often give even the smallest details great literary weight, due to their dual meanings. The symbolism in “The Things They Carried” guides the reader through the complex development of characters by establishing their humanity during the inhumane circumstance of war, articulating what the men need for emotional and spiritual survival, and by revealing the character’s psychological burdens.
In the chapter “ghost soldiers” shame and guilt is shown by O’Brien and how he so mad that he got shot. In the chapter O’Brien did not think that getting shot in the but was an honorable way out of the war. O’Brien is mad at the fact that Bobby could have killed him. “He has to lay on his stomach every night because of the pain you caused him”(O’Brien 182).He is so flustered that he will never be one hundred again.O’Brien also thinks that Bobby should pay for what he did to
The book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is fiction and truth wound together to create a frustrating and addicting novel of fiction about the Vietnam war. O’Brien created stories by using his experiences during the Vietnam whether they are true stories or not is an unattainable knowledge for the reader, the only person of that knowledge is only O 'Brien himself. Through his writing he emphasized the the fact that you cannot perfectly recall the experiences of your past when your telling a story but the way it is told is “true sometime than the happening-truth(O’Brien 171) which helps give The Things They Carried depth beyond that of a “true”, true story.
Not just the physical burdens but emotional as well. In this book title the word ‘Things” is both literal and figurative at the same time. Whilst all of the men carry the physical burden of heavy equipment like O’Brien explained in one short story there is alot of weight in the gear and weapons like how all the men carried a nylon-covered steel flak jacket which weighed 6.7 pounds. But other than the physical burdens i think that the emotional burdens weigh considerably more than the physical weight of their gear. All the men in Cross’s platoon including himself all carry heavy loads of grief, love and fear. Henry Dobbins, for example, has his girlfriends pantyhose with him for the simple fact of missing and loving her and having that as a reminder. In the same way Jimmy Cross carries letters from his ex-girlfriend martha and a picture of her he got while he was in basic training beforehand. There are many recurring structures of this story but one that had stuck out to me would be, the men being lonely or isolated from the real world and the people they love. O’Brien has an advantage over isolation when he attempts to scare Jorgenson while he is on night duty. This emphasizes his intentions of revenge that he wants against him. O’Brien has a fear of being cut off from the outside world in Summary &
In The Things The, O’Brien talks a fair amount about himself. It becomes clear that he was affected greatly by his experiences of the war and that he still has to try to cope with them everyday. Also clear is that he leaves whether or not the characters of this book are real or not as ambiguous. He leaves this ambiguous to make the point that the truth of the story doesn’t matter. What actually matters is the feelings his characters make him and the readers feel. He makes this clear by dedicating his book to his characters, by writing a conversation between himself and one of these characters, and by actually telling us that what is factually true doesn’t matter, rather an emotional truth does matter. Also clear is that in order to cope with the guilt from the war, Tim O’Brien writes The Things They Carried.
Some tangible things they carried with them were remind them of home and provide them with some luck, while others helped keep them alive during the war time. The intangible things the men carried helped the men be carried through the war and survive. Each man carried something different both mentally and physically. Tim O’Brien saw and experienced these men and what they had to go through during this time of war. The chapter “The Things They Carried” shapes each character into who he was during the war and shows us the reality of the Vietnam
Tina Chen’s critical essay provides information on how returning soldiers aren’t able to connect to society and the theme of alienation and displacement that O’Brien discussed in his stories. To explain, soldiers returning from war feel alienated because they cannot come to terms with what they saw and what they did in battle. Next, Chen discusses how O’Brien talks about soldiers reminiscing about home instead of focusing in the field and how, when something bad happens, it is because they weren’t focused on the field. Finally, when soldiers returned home they felt alienated from the country and
When O’Brien first arrives to Vietnam, the men of the platoon show him how the grief of war can be covered up by humor. As the men were patrolling near a village off the South China Sea they suddenly started to encounter sniper fire. The firefight only lasted a few minutes but Lt. Cross decided to order an airstrike on the village anyways. After the strike was over, the platoon proceeded to the smoldering village to find nothing but “…an old man who lay face up near a pigpen at the center of the village. His right arm was gone. At his face there were already many flies and gnats.”(). To many, this image of a destroyed village and the mutilated old man would cause horror and plight. Instead of that normal reaction, “Dave Jensen went over and shook the old man’s hand. “How-dee-doo,” he said.”(). The other men of the platoon also went up to the dead man’s body and shook his hand while adding a comment. This disturbing response the men have to the dead old man isn’t one of disrespect, it is their coping mechanism for realizing what they just did. Because O’Brien was new to Vietnam he had yet to understand why the men were all doing this. He was awestruck by the actions...
The Things They Carried represents a compound documentary novel written by a Vietnam veteran, Tim O'Brien, in whose accounts on the Vietnam war one encounters graphical depictions of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Thus, the stories "Speaking of Courage," "The Man I Killed," "How to Tell a True War Story," "Enemies" and "Friends," "Stockings," and "The Sweetheart of The Song Tra Bong "all encompass various examples of PTSD.
The Things They Carried is a collection of stories about the Vietnam War that the author, Tim O’Brien, uses to convey his experiences and feelings about the war. The book is filled with stories about the men of Alpha Company and their lives in Vietnam and afterwards back in the United States. O’Brien captures the reader with graphic descriptions of the war that make one feel as if they were in Vietnam. The characters are unique and the reader feels sadness and compassion for them by the end of the novel. To O’Brien the novel is not only a compilation of stories, but also a release of the fears, sadness, and anger that he has felt because of the Vietnam War.
One form of guilt that the soldiers face is the weight of not being able to save their friends. As always in the case of war, there are several casualties that rock the platoon of men and each feels responsible in one death or another. After Ted Lavender is shot and killed while Lieutenant Cross is busy daydreaming about a girl back home, Cross is unable to keep himself from shaking and sobbing in his foxhole. Cross feels such guilt for not protecting his soldiers that he decides to burn the pictures and letters from Martha, so as to not be distracted by the thought of her. The fatality of Kiowa also weighs heavy on the mind of Norman Bowker. After another failure in leadership by Lieutenant Cross, the platoon sets up camp in a low lying field of human waste. As the rain pounds the soldiers and raises the depth of muck, a mortar hits Kiowa and buries him. Norman Bowker attempts to rescue his friend, but is overwhelmed by smell and taste of the sludge. He loses his grasp of Kiowa’s boot and Norman’s friend is lost in the mud. Although Lieutenant Cross and another unnamed soldier carry some feelings of guilt for Kiowa’s death, it is Norman Bowker who cannot forgive himself for letting go of Kiowa’s boot. Later in the story, O’Brien discloses that Norman hangs himself in the local YMCA after years of guilt. The author also shares his own personal feelings of
In Tim O’Brien’s novel, “The Things They Carried,” imaginations can be both beneficial and corrosive. This novel consist of story truth and real truth. Throughout the novel, imagination plays a big role. Tim O’Brien wrote his book about the war mainly based on his memory of the war. He did not remember every details of the war, thus he made up some false details to the stories to make it seems more interesting. He wants the readers to be able to feel how he felt and understand how everything happened as he tells the story. He wants to provoke the emotional truth. O’Brien tries to prove that imaginations is not completely a bad thing and that it is also a good thing. O’Brien starts to create stories about what could have happen and what he could not do at the war in addition to the original war story. With the power of imaginations, O’Brien is able to talk about something that he could have done but did not do in his past. Imaginations helped him escape the reality. Imagination has the job of finding the real truth, attempting reconciliations and creating reality.