Necessity in The Things They Carried
Necessity is a rather slippery concept in terms of definition. The notion of what an individual requires for his or her survival varies with the particular situation at any given time. These needs may intensify or become distorted as one finds himself in an increasingly dangerous situation, particularly a life-and-death one such as war. Such dire circumstances may provoke in an average person feelings of extreme vulnerability, and the desire to hold on to all that he can, not unlike a child's instinct to grasp the nearest object in his search for comfort while in the throes of anxiety. Despite the fact that these "necessary" items or ideas that he clings to may impair or even threaten to destroy the person, abandoning them may seem impossible.
"The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien displays necessity in its destructive aspects as well as its sustaining ones. It thoroughly examines the burdens of the soldiers and the effects these burdens have on a man in a life-threatening situation. But in his examination of these things that the men carry, O'Brien poses a puzzling question: do these "necessities" that the men carry on their backs and in their minds keep them alive, or lead to their own demise? In "The Things They Carried," Tim O'Brien examines the numerous facets of the concept of necessity and questions how truly necessary certain things really are.
The most obvious need of the men in the story is the supplies that they carry that will keep them physically alive. O'Brien makes this clear by listing every detail and accounting for every ounce of food, clothing and weaponry. He also establishes the importance by listing those items first in the story. "The things they carried ...
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... must bear. Perhaps when one feels the most needy is the time when he must free himself from those excesses that weigh him down and become like the soldiers in their dreams; "they gave themselves over to lightness, they were carried, they were purely borne" (22).
Sources Cited and Consulted
Calloway, Catherine. "'How to Tell a True War Story': Metafiction in The Things They Carried." Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36.4 (1995): 249. Expanded Academic ASAP.
Jarraway, David R. "'Excremental Assault'" in Tim O'Brien: Trauma and Recovery in Vietnam War Literature.": Modern Fiction Studies 44.3 (1998): p.695-711.
Kaplan, Steven. "The Undying Uncertainty of the Narrator in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried." Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 35.1 (1993): 43. Expanded Academic ASAP.
O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway Books, 1990.
ccording to the 1990 Veterans organization report, one in every three Vietnam veterans that were in heavy combat suffers from post-traumatic stress; this includes thirty-three percent of soldiers who went to Vietnam, or nearly one million troops, who gave into post-traumatic stress. PTSD must have been common in the group of soldiers in Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” due to the amount of burdens each soldier carried. Throughout the story, O’Brien demonstrates theme of psychological, physical and mental burdens carried by every soldier. He emphasizes these burdens by discussing the weight that the soldiers carry; their psychological and mental stress they have to undertake as each of them experience the brutality of the Vietnam War. The physical burden that each soldier carried was a necessity for them due to their emotional burdens that they carried.
In the short story, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, each soldier carries many items during times of war and strife, but each necessity differs. This short story depicts what each soldier carries mentally, physically, and emotionally on his shoulders as long, fatiguing weeks wain on during the Vietnam War. The author Tim O’Brien is a Vietnam War veteran, an author, the narrator, and a teacher. The main character, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross is a Vietnam War soldier who is away at war fighting a mind battle about a woman he left behind in New Jersey because he is sick with love while trying to fulfill his duties as a soldier to keep America free. Tim O’Brien depicts in “The Things They Carried” a troubled man who also shoulders the
King, Rosemary. "O'Brien's 'How to Tell a True War Story.'" The Explicator. 57.3 (1999): 182. Expanded Academic ASAP.
In this example, after many hours of carrying these supplies the soldiers would start to break down physically. Fatigue and muscle pain would start to cloud their vision and judgment. The weight of the things that they carried had devastating effects on their bodies but the soldiers had to endure. All of these supplies were the most significant to the soldiers because they were the most impor...
Being forced into a war he has no interest in, Tim O’brien recounts his time fighting in the vietnam war. Many of the soldiers there carried things deep to their hearts. Others carried fear, guilt, and despair of what they had done and what was to come. These physical things were a way these soldiers could cope with their feelings and try and stay sane during these times. “Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.”(1) These letters were coping mechanisms for Jimmy and he read them when he needed comforting or just to read them to help him forget.
Looking at the story “The Things They Carried” the reader is given a picture of a daily routine during the Vietnam War. It takes a deeper look at several people, dealing with war, personal fear, and the weight of the supplies carried to survive. “The things they carried were largely determined by necessity.” (O’Brien 114) With the exception of the required items needed to fight the war, the necessities needed, were determined by the individual, to survive the grind of the war. As in the story, although not in a war, people are given the necessary items to execute daily job functions, but also carry the weight of life’s needs, making decisions every day that send them down the bumpy road of life.
plays a big role in the way the article is presented and what angle it
Depending on what you are reading you will notice that the audience that an author writes for varies from genre to genre. The scholarly article had aimed for an audience that was studying the same thing as they were writing about; while, the mass media article had got an audience that was very general. It was easy to point out the differences between the two articles because in the mass media the speak broadly about the topic, in a language that everyone will know instead of only words psychology doctors would know. The article “Do Att...
Some authors choose to write stories and novels specifically to evoke certain emotions from their readers as opposed to writing it for just a visual presentation. In order to do this, they occasionally stretch the truth and “distort” the event that actually occurred. The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, is a compilation of short stories about the Vietnam War with distortion being a key element in each of them.
... could not help themselves, they were not going to be helped. If struggle were encountered, men had personalized ways to reconnect with the real world, and if a tragedy were encountered which affected the entire company, they also found a combined way to cope with this pressure. The priorities of men during the war shifted greatly toward emotional connections to people and events other than the war, and it was these connections that helped them survive and return home. Coping with the stress and burden of war is not an easy task for anyone, yet in The Things they Carried, O'Brien depicts men dealing and coping as much as they can, using only their primeval resources. They learn how to cope with the barest necessities in life, and they learn how to make use of the smallest opportunities to obtain the most relief and joy from every moment in life.
The Things They Carried is a war narrative, “made up of many vignette-like narratives embedded within other narratives which seem to portray O’Brien’s memories of the Vietnam War” (Esmaeili 2), which is a topic we have yet to be exposed to in the form of a story. The Things They Carried, while consisting of soldiers carrying supplies, also carries with itself an interaction between emotion and “metaphoric conceptualization” (Esmaeili 1). Students are able to cognitively process these connections, resulting in a greater understanding of the importance in O’Brien’s manipulation of rhetorical devices. Compared to other war narratives on the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried forms a focus on the “bad form of postmodernism” (Esmaeili 2), where in addition to the concept of emotional language, allows for students to walk in the shoes of war veterans and see the war from their perspective. O’Brien allows students to view literature in a different light. Rather than reading stories where students have to interpret their hidden meaning through the principle of the iceberg, like Hemingway’s, they can consciously navigate through the same cognitive map as the characters while
There were certain items or supplies that each soldier needed to possess that aided in their survival. Other items were discretionary or optional, not entirely important for the survival of the soldier. The optional items carried or possessed were like a crutch. They were not necessarily important to the remainder of the platoon but helpful to the individual soldier attempting to cope with the realities of the conflict. Two of these soldiers were: Kiowa and Ted Lavender.
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