53. The chapter is told centrally in the third person omniscient point of view, providing various insight on differing characters such as Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Mitchell Sanders, a juvenile trooper, and Azar. The narrator isn’t limited to information and provides substantial background info and transcending details for each mentioned character. Essentially, the reader is given diverse point of views ranging from the many differing characters mentioned in the chapter.
54. Azar copes with deaths by making senseless jokes and comments to ease the situation for himself. This is seen recurringly throughout the story. In “In the Field,” he constantly makes jokes about Kiowa’s death, pointing out the “irony.” Azar made remarks, saying, “‘Man,
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Additionally, O’Brien returns to the theme of the influence of others when describing Cross’s experiences. O’Brien touches upon the ideal by utilizing Jimmy Cross as a prime example. According to the passage, Cross was never destined to be a commanding officer in the U.S. military. Cross essentially joined the commanding officer program as a result of his friends peer pressuring him to enroll and for a few credits without acknowledging the repercussions of his actions in pursuing the war. Jimmy Cross now resents his ill decision as he endures Hell in Vietnam, especially after taking responsibility over Kiowa’s death. This ideal is significant and prominent as it reflects the basis and justification for many soldiers who enlisted in the army, which is due to the influence of others. This is a recurring ideal, which is evident in “On the Rainy River” where O’Brien is ultimately persuaded into pursuing the war as a result of a mirage portraying his loved ones cheering him to enlist in the war.
58. According to the passage, O’Brien believes that storytelling conveys a stronger meaning than any real account. It amplifies the message one is trying to assert by engaging an audience through vivid, but fictional detail. O’Brien uses false events to represent greater emotional truths, which is best displayed through fictional accounts. This is a prevalent and recurring ideal throughout the
Tim O’Brien begins his journey as a young “politically naive” man and has recently graduated out of Macalester College in the United States of America. O’Brien’s plan for the future is steady, but this quickly changes as a call to an adventure ruins his expected path in life. In June of 1968, he receives a draft notice, sharing details about his eventual service in the Vietnam War. He is not against war, but this certain war seemed immoral and insignificant to Tim O’Brien. The “very facts were shrouded in uncertainty”, which indicates that the basis of the war isn’t well known and perceived
...r because it seems impossible to reconstruct an event from this objective point of view. Maybe the point of telling stories is not trying to recreate the reality of a past event, but it is the message that matters because that might be in the end the only thing that does not necessarily depend on single details of the story, but on the overall picture of an event. That is why to O’Brien another important component of a war story is the fact that a war story will never pin down the definite truth and that is why a true war story “never seems to end” (O’Brien, 425). O’Brien moves the reader from the short and simple statement “This is the truth” to the conclusion that, “In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nohting much is ever very true” (O’Brien, 428). These two statements frame the entire irony of the story, from its beginning to its end. Almost like the popular saying “A wise man admits that he knows nothing.”
Jimmy Cross, being only twenty-four years old, was very inexperienced, as were most of the others serving in Vietnam. As stated by Tim O’Brien, in this short story, “He was just a kid at war, in love” (600). He didn’t want to be the leade...
The death of Kiowa is the point in this story, and arguably the entire novel, where the true nature of war becomes evident. His death in any situation would have been tragic, and camping in that “shit field” alone would have been an emotionally scarring experience; however, that these events had to coincide in time only multiplies the gravity of the situation. Interestingly, every soldier has his own way of grappling with such overwhelming feelings of grief for his highly-esteemed comrade. Yet what every man has in common is that in the end he concludes that he alone is the one ultimately responsible for Kiowa’s death.
3. The novel represents the world and its inhabitants on a miniscule level, by conveying the differences between the characters and how they act towards one another.
O Brien 's point of view is an accurate one as he himself because he is a Vietnam veteran. The title of the short story is meaningful because it describes each soldier’s personality and how he handles conflict within the mind and outside of the body during times of strife. The title fits the life as a soldier perfectly because it shows the reality that war is more than just strategy and attacking of forces. O’Brien narrates the story from two points of view: as the author and the view of the characters. His style keeps the reader informed on both the background of things and the story itself at the same
There is something special about human beings. Human beings have the capacity to sacrifice themselves for others. Not all do it and many do just the opposite. In the story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’BRIEN, demonstrates that statement. Jimmy Cross, who is 1st lieutenant of his platoon, is a man of integrity and grace which unfortunately starts to diminish throughout his journey. Jimmy begins to fantasize of, “love” which starts to interfere with his daily life, subsequently leading to his excess amount of emotional baggage that he carries, but, ultimately he realizes his fault and he begins to reconstruct his outlook on life tremendously.
Lieutenant Cross is a character who, until the death of a soldier, has been very loose and not taken the war seriously. He had let his soldiers throw away their supplies, take drugs, and sing happy songs in the middle of the serious war. He was only concerned with Martha; he dreamt about being with her, and he was delighted when he received letters from her. Tim O’Brien says, “Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin.” (p. 2) This shows how all he cared about was Martha; he was not paying attention to his real life and his surroundings. He was basically living in a world of fantasy because they lived in two separate worlds. Being unable to wake up from this dream made him potentially weak because his mind was always wandering elsewhere, never in the current situation. This made him an easy target for his enemies because if this had gone on, then he would start to fear death, fear fighting, and fear the war. He would become a coward because he would wish for the day when he could be with Martha again after the war. This would greatly weaken him and his army both, and they would most likely lose to the enemy.
Last but not least, O’Connor confirms that even a short story is a multi-layer compound that on the surface may deter even the most enthusiastic reader, but when handled with more care, it conveys universal truths by means of straightforward or violent situations. She herself wished her message to appeal to the readers who, if careful enough, “(…)will come to see it as something more than an account of a family murdered on the way to Florida.”
...nal lives, but O'Brien's choice to focus one soldier, Lt. Cross, lets the reader scope the depths of the human mind during an extremely stressful situation. As a young lieutenant, this man shoulders his own longing for love, the death of a fellow soldier, the guilt he places on himself, as well as the added duties of responsibilities for a platoon of men. The narrator provides one specific quote, which perfectly summarizes the mental aspects of war: "They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing -- these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight" (443). Indeed, the intangibles in this story do have tangible weight -- weight that Lt. Cross must carry for the rest of his life.
One of the later entries in the book called “Good form”, helps alleviate the suspicion of dishonesty in the stories by bluntly telling the reader that all the other entries are a mix of both fact and fiction. O’Brien feels the need to make up parts of his stories due to the fact that he wants the reader to experience emotions as opposed to mental visuals. He describes these emotion-laden scenes as “story-truth” due to the fact that they are part story and part truth. The parts that are only for emotio...
Death, it cannot be prevented from happening, no matter how many bullets you carry, or how high you get. Kiowa, an Indian, a soldier, a warrior, he is just there, in Vietnam, at war, carrying on a tradition, carrying the distrusting feelings of the white man and most important carrying the pride of his people.
In "On the Rainy River," O'Brien reveals his mindset and character before fighting in the war. He views himself to be “too good for the war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything… above it” (O’Brien 45). O’Brien’s decision to stay in the United States and fight in the war is an act of choice instead instinct. However, war robs its participants of personal choice by rendering them unable to control their actions. In war, soldiers are instead controlled largely by raw emotion, and therefore instinct as well. For example, O’Brien reflects on his experiences with death in “Ambush,” describing the kill as “automatic… to make him go away – just evaporate… [he] had already thrown the grenade before telling [himself] to thr...
O’Brien subjectifies truth by obscuring both fact and fiction within his storytelling. In each story he tells there is some fuzziness in what actually happened. There are two types of truths in this novel, “story-truth” and “happening-truth” (173). “Happening-truth” is what happened in the moment and “story-truth” is the way the storyteller reflects and interprets a situation. O’Brien uses these two types of truths to blur out the difference between fact and fiction. For example, when Rat Kiley tells a story he always overexaggerates. He does this because “he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt,” (85). This is the same for most storytellers, even O’Brien. When he tells the story of Norman Bowker he makes his own truth stating, “He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own” (154). Not everything that O’Brien said was fact, however, it made the the meaning of the story effective and significant. O’Brien reveals that he never killed a man after devoting a whole short story to “The Man I Killed.” When his daughter asks “Daddy, tell the truth, did you ever kill anybody?” he can honestly say “Of course not,” or “Yes,” (172). This illustrates the subjectivity of truth, how both truths can in fact be true. This goes for all the stories told in this novel, the truth is held in the storyteller 's
O’Brien does not use traditional war heroes so that the reader can understand the truth of how soldiers really felt in the war. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross felt a huge responsibility for the lives of the men that he led. After one of the soldiers named Ted Lavender was shot and killed Jim Cross said that “He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war.” When Rat Kileys friend Curt Lemon died he felt so much grief for the death of his friend. Rat Kiley was so depressed that he punished an innocent baby buffalo, “He stepped back and shot it through the right front knee. The animal did not make a sound. It went down hard, then got up again, and Rat took careful aim and shot off an ear. He shot it in the hindquarters and in the little hump at its back. He shot it twice in the flanks. It wasn’t to kill; it was to hurt.” He punished the innocent buffalo because his emotions took control of him. Years after Tim O’Brien’s friend Kiowa died he felt that he had to revisi...