The Things They Carried Chapter Summary

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Summary & Analysis The novel “The things they carried” is set into motion with the background of a Lieutenant in an active duty team in Vietnam. Lt. Cross throughout this book is obsessed with a woman named Martha, someone he dated before he shipped to Vietnam. He is distracted by looking at her letters and photographs that she had wrote him in basic training. Cross questions her virtue and wishes that she could love him as much as he loved her. Cross is in battle with several people under his command, and he is unsure of everything he does throughout this book. Cross’s guilt is apparent when his men die throughout the book, however, is the lieutenant’s most showed when Ted Lavender dies. Cross confesses to O’Brien later on about how he has …show more content…

Not just the physical burdens but emotional as well. In this book title the word ‘Things” is both literal and figurative at the same time. Whilst all of the men carry the physical burden of heavy equipment like O’Brien explained in one short story there is alot of weight in the gear and weapons like how all the men carried a nylon-covered steel flak jacket which weighed 6.7 pounds. But other than the physical burdens i think that the emotional burdens weigh considerably more than the physical weight of their gear. All the men in Cross’s platoon including himself all carry heavy loads of grief, love and fear. Henry Dobbins, for example, has his girlfriends pantyhose with him for the simple fact of missing and loving her and having that as a reminder. In the same way Jimmy Cross carries letters from his ex-girlfriend martha and a picture of her he got while he was in basic training beforehand. There are many recurring structures of this story but one that had stuck out to me would be, the men being lonely or isolated from the real world and the people they love. O’Brien has an advantage over isolation when he attempts to scare Jorgenson while he is on night duty. This emphasizes his intentions of revenge that he wants against him. O’Brien has a fear of being cut off from the outside world in Summary &

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