Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

At the age of 21 Tim O’Brien was drafted for the Vietnam War. He states that The Things They Carried is a way for readers to feel what he felt during the war. The key experiences and emotions that he wants the reader to feel are frustration, not being able to find your enemy, having soldiers all around you losing their life, and being upset about being in a war in which you yourself do not believe in. Now forty years later after the Vietnam War first started O’Brien is left with face-less responsibility and face-less grief. He says it best himself “You bring war back home with you.

Lieutenant General Harold Moore and Joseph Galloway did a remarkable job writing a historiography that critically examined a variety of authentic sources and wrote an unbiased work that will stand the tests of time. We Were Soldiers is not just a story about the battles of X-Ray and Albany. It tells the stories of Americans and Vietnamese soldiers who endured the atrocities in the Ia Drang Valley. It is an impartial piece of literature that does not demonize the Vietnamese soldier, yet still praises the American soldier. The book is a marvelous account of history, absent of political opinions, detailing the true story of the Ia Drang Valley.

I found out later in a short biography that the author was actually in the Vietnam War, and he returned home on an honorable discharge. This really means that he wrote the story with a personal experience of the Vietnam War. This also makes a reader wonder what in the story was in his personal experience, and what was actually fiction. In any case, the story was written to be an accurate view of the story, and to provide a microscope into these soldier’s lives.

The Things They Carried The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a story about the Vietnam War and the experiences O’Brien saw and felt. His narrative is a personal reflection of what he experienced in Vietnam years ago. However, does this reflection have the validity of a primary source? O’Brien lived through horrific events during the Vietnam War, he suffered them first hand, and his experiences are recorded in his memories and retold later in his books. How reliable is his narrative about Vietnam?

This had a strong affect on most of these men and O’Brien uses different ways to show how the Vietnam War affected them both physically and mentally. In order to display these affects he constantly relates different things in battle to a normal life back at home. Through the use of storytelling, fear, and physical and emotional burdens, O’Brien creates a certain environment that shows how the Vietnam War affected himself and these men. These themes are most apparent in “How to tell a true War story”, “The Lives of the dead”, “The Dentist”, and “On The Rainy River”. Through the use of storytelling O’Brien relates different situations and stressful events to the experiences the soldiers encountered throughout the war.

It shows O’Briens (author) experiences that he had during the war. The short story is told in third person describing emotion and revealing actions of Jimmy Cross. Lieutenant Cross is in command of an active combat duty in Vietnam. While cross is in Vietnam he begins to be carried away and occupied by the thoughts of Martha. Martha is a young women who he was dating before he joined the army.

“The Things They Carried” is considered by many, a great addition to books based on Viet... ... middle of paper ... ...realistic points. Tim O’Brien does a wonderful job in presenting realistic ideas in “The Things They Carried,” which is a story that sits on the fine line between “crazy and almost crazy” (Kaplan 232). Whether it is imagery, conflict, or any other literary device, Tim O’Brien uses these items along with his great understanding of fiction to accurately portray what happened in Vietnam (Kaplan 230). It is because of this talent that Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” will remain a perfect example of truthful fictitious literature. Richard Nixon’s quote may have applied quite well to America whenever he was president; however, after the release of Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” this quote is now invalid because Tim O’Brien has proved that the truth can be told about Vietnam, it just needs to be told in a piece of fiction for its truth to be heard.

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.

Not only that, he was able to include the elements of a novel: mood, tone, plot, setting, language, conflict, genre, and point of view. This novel definitely contributes to the genre, memoir, because it’s written from the personal knowledge of Beah’s history. I recommend this book to others because reading this will benefit readers, as it did for me, by helping us realize and see a different world. It transports us into the lives of children whose lives have been altered by war. It teaches us a lesson that survival isn’t easy and war can change a beautiful person to the most alarming person, but it’ll never be your fault.

It is a tale of a man who goes through hell and back fighting in one of the world’s worst wars, and shows a bloody, gruesome picture of life in a war zone. This novel, of course dealing with sensitive topics also handles those topics very appropriately, not censoring or leaving out words or scenarios when they’re applicable. It gives the reader a real sense of what is happening in the book, as it is very descriptive and does not favor leaving out details. A Farewell to Arms is superior to the other novels mentioned simply by its intensity; of course, all three novels mentioned above tell great stories, and do it quite well. However, Hemingway’s storytelling trumps that of Steinbeck or Twain.