Can you imagine having to leave your home to fight in a war that you really don’t agree with? This week, I have been able to finish reading Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried; the novel had a total of 260 pages. Throughout the novel, Tim O’Brien narrates a series of short stories that describe his growing up in Worthington, Minnesota, his leaving home, and his arrival and adventures in the jungle of Vietnam. Tim O’Brien describes the many things that each of his characters must physically and emotionally carry. During his one-year tour of duty, Tim loses many good friends, including Tim Lavender, Curt Lemon, and Kiowa. This week, I have also been able to begin reading John L. Parker’s novel Racing the Rain; I am currently on page 110. In Racing in the Rain, Quenton Cassidy is a young man who is growing up in rural Florida. He faces many conflicts related to his friend, Trapper Nelson, and his dilemma related to running track or playing basketball. While reading The Things They Carried, I have been connecting and questioning; I have been visualizing while reading Racing the Rain. In The Things They Carried …show more content…
Trapper Nelson is a very tall man with wide shoulders. His skin is worn out and very tan. He very rarely wears shoes so his feet are dirty and tough. This is supported by this quote. “One of his (Trapper) untied combat boots came off right away and he soon kicked off the other”(Parker 87). Quenton on the other hand was a very slight kid. He had skinny legs and knobby knees. His friends all made fun of him because he was so skinny. Here is one of the many times this happens. “Everyone turned to look. Bickerstaff smiled. Of course. The skinny kid that kept trying out for basketball. Everyone was craning around to look, and the laughter had started already”(Parker 44). These two characters had very different appearances when I visualized
After reading into the storm there were two characters. There was Tucker and Richard they both had numerous things in frequent. The primary thing they had in frequent was they both liked water.Secondary , they both were guardians and they were also known as heroes. Not only that they were also athletics and they both had their characteristic. Like Tucker was a youth and Richard was a senior the other inequality was tucker was alive and Richard was dead from what it said in the passage.
Tim O’Brien is a very gifted author, but he is also a veteran of the Vietnam War and fought with the United States in that controversial war. Tim O’Brien was drafted into the Vietnam War in 1968. He served as an infantryman, and obtained the rank of sergeant and won a Purple Heart after being wounded by shrapnel. He was discharged from the Vietnam War in 1970. I believe that O’Brien’s own images and past experiences he encountered in the Vietnam War gave him inspiration to write the story “The Things They Carried.” O’Brien tells the story in third person narrative form about Lt. Jimmy Cross and his platoon of young American men in the Vietnam War. In “The Things They Carried” we can see differences and similarities between the characters by the things they hold close to them.
In the chapter the “Rainy River” of the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien conveys a deep moral conflict between fleeing the war to go to Canada versus staying and fighting in a war that he does not support. O’Brien is an educated man, a full time law student at Harvard and a liberal person who sees war as a pointless activity for dimwitted, war hungry men. His status makes him naive to the fact that he will be drafted into the war and thus when he receives his draft notice, he is shocked. Furthermore, his anti-war sentiments are thoroughly projected, and he unravels into a moral dilemma between finding freedom in Canada or standing his ground and fighting. An image of a rainy river marking the border between Minnesota and Canada is representative of this chapter because it reflects O’Brien’s moral division between finding freedom in Canada or standing his ground and fighting in the Vietnam war.
War is serious! In the short story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, he recounts his personal experience with war and personal issues, not just any war but the Vietnam War. This was highly disregarded war by most Americans. Lives would be forever changed from their experiences of battles, guilt, wounds, heart brokes, emotions, and even death. The main character of the story is Tim O’Brien, who is also the narrator and protagonist. These collections of stories are a glimpse of his personal encounters. Another dynamic character was Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, commanding officer of the platoon. Other characters include Alpha Company soldiers Ted Lavender, Kiowa, and other soldiers. . The mission for O’Brien, his fellow battle buddies, and commanding officers is not easy and is filled with personal inner battles and conflicts. Some tried coping with things they carried from home and necessity items such as photos, military equipment and rifles, and miscellaneous foods among other things that would prove to be a turning point in t...
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.
"The Things They Carried," is a fiction story-telling book about the Vietnam War by Tim O'Brien that describes the physical and emotional burdens the men carry not only during their time in Vietnam but also years after leaving the warfront. The book is a series of stories told with O'Brien as the main narrator. O'Brien tells of the journey he takes alongside his unit, revealing his fight for courage and decision to commit to the serving in the war. It is a groundbreaking meditation on war, memory, imagination and the redemptive power of storytelling.
For anyone under the age of 50 or so, the Vietnam War occupies an indistinct place in the closet of memory. Recalled by those alive then as the first “televised” war, its grainy images have been replaced by the 24-hour detailed coverage of more recent conflicts. The life of the foot soldier, however, hasn’t changed all that much in the 39 years since the war ended. In his extraordinary novel, Karl Marlantes portrays with brutal sincerity the fear, valor and perseverance that are the lot of the warrior.
As students we are brainwashed by ancient myths such as The Iliad, where war is extolled and the valorous warrior praised. Yet, modern novels such as Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (THINGS) challenge those very notions. Like The Iliad, THINGS is about war. It is about battles and soldiers, victory and survival, yet the message O'Brien gives us in THINGS runs almost contradictory to the traditional war story. Whereas traditional stories of war take place on battlefields where soldier battles soldier and the mettle of man is tested, O'Brien's battle occurs in the shadowy, private place of a soldier's mind. Like the Vietnam War itself, THINGS forces Americans to question the foundations of their beliefs and values because it calls attention to the inner conscience. More than a war story, O'Brien's The Things They Carried is an expose on personal courage. Gone are the brave and glorious warriors such as those found in the battle of Troy. In THINGS, they are replaced by young men who experience not glory or bravery, but fear, horror, and a personal sense of shame. As mythic courage clashes with the modern's experience of it, a battle is waged in THINGS that isn't confined to the rice-patties, jungles, and shit-fields of Vietnam. Carrying more than the typical soldier's wares, O'Brien's narrator is armed with an arsenal of feelings and words that slash away at an invisible enemy that is the myth of courage, on an invisible battlefield that is the Vietnam veteran's mind.
In “The Things They Carried” Tim O’Brien brings the reader to a collection of short stories. He recounts the experiences of the soldiers during the Vietnam war. It was shocking to him that people in his home town have little or no idea about the war. The author describes the soldiers with the 15-20 pounds of necessary needs they are carrying. Tim personally relates to some of the stories, one of which he was planning to run to Canada.
In The Things They Carried, an engaging novel of war, author Tim O’Brien shares the unique warfare experience of the Alpha Company, an assembly of American military men that set off to fight for their country in the gruesome Vietnam War. Within the novel, the author O’Brien uses the character Tim O’Brien to narrate and remark on his own experience as well as the experiences of his fellow soldiers in the Alpha Company. Throughout the story, O’Brien gives the reader a raw perspective of the Alpha Company’s military life in Vietnam. He sheds light on both the tangible and intangible things a soldier must bear as he trudges along the battlefield in hope for freedom from war and bloodshed. As the narrator, O’Brien displayed a broad imagination, retentive memory, and detailed descriptions of his past as well as present situations. 5. The author successfully uses rhetoric devices such as imagery, personification, and repetition of O’Brien to provoke deep thought and allow the reader to see and understand the burden of the war through the eyes of Tim O’Brien and his soldiers.
Through The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien moves beyond the horror of fighting in the Vietnam War to examine with sensitivity and insight the nature of courage and fear. Included, is a collection of interrelated stories. A few of the stories are brutal, while others are flawed, blurring the distinction between fact and fiction. All the stories, however, deal with one platoon. Some are about the wartime experiences of soldiers, and others are about a 43-year-old writer reminiscing about his platoon’s experiences. In the beginning chapter, O’Brien rambles about the items the soldiers carry into battle, ranging from can openers, pocketknives, and mosquito repellent o Kool-Aid, sewing kits, and M-16 assault rifles. Yet, the story is truly about the intangible things the soldiers “carry”: “grief, terror, love, longing… shameful memories (and) the common secret of cowardice” (Harris & O’Brien 21).
The Vietnam War was not a “pretty” war. Soldiers were forced to fight guerilla troops, were in combat during horrible weather, had to live in dangerous jungles, and, worst of all, lost sight of who they were. Many soldiers may have entered with a sense of pride, but returned home desensitized. The protagonist in Louise Erdrich’s “The Red Convertible,” is testament to this. In the story, the protagonist is a young man full of life prior to the war, and is a mere shell of his former self after the war. The protagonists in Tim O’Brien’s “If I Die in a Combat Zone,” and Irene Zabytko’s “Home Soil,” are also gravely affected by war. The three characters must undergo traumatic experiences. Only those who fought in the Vietnam War understand what these men, both fictional and in real life, were subjected to. After the war, the protagonists of these stories must learn to deal with a war that was not fought with to win, rather to ensure the United States remained politically correct in handling the conflict. This in turn caused much more anguish and turmoil for the soldiers. While these three stories may have fictionalized events, they connect with factual events, even more so with the ramifications of war, whether psychological, morally emotional, or cultural. “The Red Convertible,” and “Home Soil,” give readers a glimpse into the life of soldiers once home after the war, and how they never fully return, while “If I Die in a Combat Zone,” is a protest letter before joining the war. All three protagonists must live with the aftermath of the Vietnam War: the loss of their identity.
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.
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.
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien offers readers very unique and interesting view of the Vietnam War and the mentality of a soldier.