Post War Impact of Vietnam Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is an excellent piece of metafiction. While highlighting the revulsions of the war, O’Brien often times narrates his personal experiences in Vietnam. Line between fiction and actual account of the war is typically blurred. Book is not only quite descriptive but it also perfectly conveys the horrors and realities of combat. For this research paper I will analyze Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried’ and examine the transformations faced by young men, lack of support for returning Vietnam veterans and the bias portrayed in the media. Vietnam war has been one of the most deadliest and expensive wars to date. Not only it resulted in massive casualties and financial losses, it also made a long lasting effect on American psyche. Following the withdrawal of US combat forces in 1973, majority of Americans tried to overlook what had transpired for the past decade. It served as a devastating blow to American image both domestically and abroad. Vietnam war was heavily protested, misunderstood and highly controversial, and although many question the necessity of the invasion, yet it has continued to shape the way American foreign policies and military have evolved over the years. While Vietnam was the first war to be comprehensively televised still it had a negative stigma to it that was exploited by the media and Hollywood. Soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice, willingly or unwillingly were neglected and scorned. Book starts off with the introduction of a character named Jimmy cross who is a Lieutenant in Alpha Company. Jimmy Cross is a junior in college and the only reason he joins the Reserve Officers Training Corps is because his friends are doing it. This shows u... ... middle of paper ... ...lenty of help available for those who are suffering. Media no longer objectifies veterans as cold-blooded killers but as present day heroes. Various non-profit organizations like wounded warrior project, helps wounded soldiers transition back in to civilian life. Works Cited • O'Brien, Tim (1990). The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. • Race, Ethnicity, and Place in a Changing America: A perspective by John W Frazer • The Oxford Companion to American Military History. Ed. John Whiteclay Chambers II. New York: Oxford UP, 1999 • https://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry/VietnamW • Peter Church, ed. A Short History of South-East Asia. Singapore. John Wiley & Sons, 2006 • Walter Dean Myers." BrainyQuote.com. Xplore Inc, 2014. 14 May 2014. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/walterdean532686.html
“The Things They Carried” is a story about the Vietnam war, in the simplest of terms. It focuses on one particular team of soldiers and their experiences during the war. O’Brien’s writing is complex and has many layers. In the story, O’Brien lists the items the soldiers physically carry in a stark comparison to the things they carry mentally throughout the war. The author uses symbolism, metaphors, and imagery to show the soldiers loss of innocence and the effects of war on an individual.
The Vietnam War was a violent and costly war that needed many men to fight for its cause. These men are now known as the Vietnam veterans. Numerous veterans who fought in the war were injured or lost a comrade during battle. These soldiers fought to protect the United States and its people while risking their own lives. A lot of these brave men were either killed or injured and did not gain the respect they deserved until after the war. The Vietnam soldiers felt that they had a responsibility to protect their country and its people.
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 Things They Carried serves as a primary source of Vietnam War culture: a narrative of the men who lived it. O’Brien’s life alone is able to shed light on multiple facets of the larger story of this period of America, including the controversy of the war and its draft, the extreme conditions faced in Vietnam, and the stresses put on soldiers during this time, among other things. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien illustrates the turmoil surrounding the war in Vietnam, with a perspective transitioning from a college graduate with anti-war leanings to a drafted soldier in the chaos of guerilla warfare to a veteran reflective of the shocking events that transpired in those jungles. Through peripheral narration and first-person points
The soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War had a very shocking experience. In Tim O’Brien’s fictional novel The Things They Carried, he discusses about his own experience and the experiences of other American soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War. O’Brien, the author of this novel plays a significant role of both the character and author. He himself is a leading character who is a Vietnam veteran and expressing his story from the past as a narrator and by creating imaginary characters in his novel. O’ Brien, explains in his novel that “In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way” (O’Brien 57). O’Brien’s
From a global perspective, many readers and movie viewers worldwide know only about how American’s have suffered and the amount of pain our war veterans have endured as a result of the war. American films such as Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, Thin Red Line, and We Were Soldiers to name a few, are all Vietnam War movies that portray the loss and suffering of American life. The traditional American made movie or novel about Vietnam fails to show the human side of the struggles that the Vietnamese people both from the north and the south went through....
The Vietnam war is famous for many of its characteristics in defining American history and culture. One of the most outstanding characteristics involves how the war, particularly in the years after, stands out as being unpopular and receives the most ridicule by the American population. Several reasons exist for the extreme popularity and disdain for the war, focusing on the concepts of the wasteful aspects and the moral issues of the war.
The Vietnam War was a time of turmoil in 1970s America. To many, the war was seen as pointless and the public was not shy to let this be known to the government. Nevertheless, the brave young men that fought to defeat communism went to Vietnam, some willing, and some not so willing as the Selective Service Act gave them no choice but to serve. While the citizens were at home in the states, not too focused on the war, the men had to deal with some hellish conditions, and a heavy conscience. The men had to be on constant watch for the Viet Cong, and if this was not enough of a burden to begin with, this was just the tip of a much larger iceberg. American soldiers dealt with harsh conditions and the equipment
The novel, “The Things They Carried”, is about the experiences of Tim O’Brian and his fellow platoon members during their time fighting in the Vietnam War. They face much adversity that can only be encountered in the horrors of fighting a war. The men experience death of friends, civilians, enemies and at points loss of their rationale. In turn, the soldiers use a spectrum of methods to cope with the hardships of war, dark humor, daydreaming, and violent actions all allow an escape from the horrors of Vietnam that they experience most days.
Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” presents the central idea that during the Vietnam ...
In Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, numerous themes are illustrated by the author. Through the portrayal of a number of characters, Tim O’Brien suggests that to adapt to Vietnam is not always more difficult than to revert back to the lives they once knew. Correspondingly the theme of change is omnipresent throughout the novel, specifically in the depiction of numerous characters.
The Vietnam war is such a controversial topic in America’s history. Some veterans that served in the war won’t even talk about it still to this day. The Vietnam war was a war that started in 1954, and lasted for about 20 years until 1975. America decided to join this war because they did not like the spread of communism and wanted to stop it at all cost. During this war, America had 4 different Presidents, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Many people believe that the United States should have gotten involved in the war, while other people believe that the United States should not have involved themselves in the war. The three topics this essay will discuss are the problems that the United States created in Vietnam and also the
Imagine the fight of Vietnam and the impact that it had on the veterans and the people there. Vietnam War was hard on most soldiers when they returned home from the striking fight. The men that had fought did what they had to live and survive, because the soldiers were drafted randomly from their birthdays. It ended up leading them into hatred from other Americans, because when they came back the people were not happy of what they did. These men were forced to kill to live even though most were just in school or starting college. All this shows that, the soldiers of the Vietnam War returned home and they were treated disrespectfully and unfairly.
Tim O'Brien is a world-renowned author receiving many recognitions for his writings. His most famous story is “The Things They Carried” , it is a fascinating tale about the insight of how it feels to experience war. The setting of this story is during the Vietnam war. We will be discussing about the Story “The things we carried” and how the protagonist jimmy cross gave up his privileged life and entered the world of the hardened soldier and his the destruction of his male innocence.lastly, we will discuss criticisms of the story and the life of the author.
Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, expresses his journey throughout the Vietnam War via a series of short stories. The novel uses storytelling to express the emotional toll the men encountered, as well as elucidate their intense experiences faced during the war. The literary theory, postmodernism, looks at these war experiences and questions their subjectivity, objectivity, and truth in a literary setting. It allows the reader to look through a lens that deepens the meaning of a work by looking past what is written and discovering the various truths. O’Brien used the storytelling process to illustrate the bleeding frame of truth. Through his unique writing style, he articulates the central idea of postmodernism to demonstrate the