Everyday we pass people, some people walk with nothing in their hands, while other people seem to carry the whole world on their shoulders. You can’t always tell when someone is carrying something, but most of the time you can see in their face how much weight they bear. The novel The Things They Carry by Tim O’Brien, is all about weight it’s infinite forms, from the weight of a gun with the sole purpose of killing, to the guilt felt by men taking lives, it’s all about carrying the weight. In this novel you gain a new perception of war, and the soldiers who fight in the wars. Modern war stories describe war as a place where you go to become a hero, soldiers fight, soldiers are brave and full of pride, they don’t back down from anything. In …show more content…
O’Brien always counters the weight of a physical object with that of an emotion the soldier is feeling. These aren’t soldiers, they are kids in uniforms, they are all so young, yet they carry enough firepower to destroy someone’s world. “They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.” (7) Armed to the teeth with weaponry they are required to carry, along with everything from home that keeps them safe the soldiers carry more than they can bear, because they need everything to survive. Along with the weight of the weapons and trinkets, they carry the knowledge of what their weapons can do as well as the knowledge of how exactly to use them. A certain anxiety rushes over you when you know you may very well have to kill, and kill …show more content…
It follows no order, it’s chaotic, it’s confusing, but it does a very very good job at describing war, and O’Brien after the war. This story has no beginning, and no end, just like his thoughts. This story starts from the middle, goes to the beginning, then ends, but the point of the story is that you see real war, the chaos, the blood, the inhumanity of the entire thing. You see a side to war that you have never seen before, you see the raw emotion of a kid who has to kill for a cause he doesn’t understand, but more than anything you gain an understanding of soldiers and what they go through. War is chaos, war is
The title of this novel, “The Wars” is illusory. Upon first glance, it makes one expect a protagonist who goes to an actual war, uses physical strength to fight on the battlefield and becomes a war hero.While part of that is true, there are also other significances of the war associated with this title. This novel recounts the journey of the protagonist, Robert Ross as he starts out as a shy, introvert and an inexperienced person before he goes to war; he experiences a change in himself as a result of the people and the battle(s) that he fights with the factors in his surroundings. Therefore, “The Wars” doesn’t necessarily mean the war with the enemy but it includes the wars at home, wars against nature and wars of relationships. Which
I wonder what it was like to witness the Vietnam War firsthand in combat. Well, in the short story, “The Things they Carried,” by Tim O’Brien, the theme was portrayed as the physical and emotional burdens that soldiers had to deal with during the Vietnam War. Throughout the story, the author goes into great detail about the heavy physical loads that the soldiers had to carry with them. Even the way O’Brien describes the many loads seems to grab your attention on the extreme conditions these men had to go through just to survive another day.
By allowing the reader the "[privilege of] the soldiers experience" (Chattarji) it shows how difficult it is to get rid of the weight as begins to define you and the more it becomes a part of a person the harder it is to remove an aspect of yourself. In his repetition, O'Brien wants to give readers a deeper meaning into the everyday struggles of soldiers. He portrays the ways that soldiers were effected in the war and focused on the burdens that developed. O'Brien highlights how war changes those involved as "[the individual dreams of soldiers rise and fall and] their hopes riddled by disillusionment, their fantasies broken by shrapnel edged realities" (Timmeran). Wartime altered soldier’s perception and caused them to develop these emotional and physical weights that followed them for years. When many solider returned they were now stuck with daily burdens that had started since the day they landed in Vietnam. Constantly, these soldiers endured the long lasting results of participating in the war and unable to escape or forget the weight that they endure. "The Things They Carried" serves as a constant reminder to readers about the true realities of soldiers and the impact of war. How soldiers are not stable as they return home because of these weights that have become a part of them and how simple acts such as carrying around a weapon has now manifested itself into an emotional burden that will not leave. Often the realities of being a soldier are not portrayed accurately but O'Brien attempts to put into perspective what it really is like to go through warfare by drawing on his own experiences as a foot
O Brien 's point of view is an accurate one as he himself because he is a Vietnam veteran. The title of the short story is meaningful because it describes each soldier’s personality and how he handles conflict within the mind and outside of the body during times of strife. The title fits the life as a soldier perfectly because it shows the reality that war is more than just strategy and attacking of forces. O’Brien narrates the story from two points of view: as the author and the view of the characters. His style keeps the reader informed on both the background of things and the story itself at the same
...otional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight" (“Carried” 23). O’Brien showed the effect that emotional longings have on one’s thoughts & feelings. Though he tells that his novel is about story-truth, which is not about war and do not have a moral; but one can understand that O’Brien’s fiction is a message against forcing young people into war. By true-made up stories; the author shows the transformation of one’s emotional state through war and its long-lasting impact. O’Brien’s stories prove that seen physical burdens emphasize the unseen emotional burden: physical burden can be expressed in words, but emotional burden, changes that are encouraged by our surroundings cannot be expressed in words- thus they always remain untrue yet true.
But he realizes “it was only a gesture.the letters were in his head” (370). He also discards the pebble she gave to him but cannot rid himself of the boulder that is the emotional burden of his love for her. The weights of desires, fears, and responsibility place great amounts of pressure on an individual. The soldiers in “The Things They Carried” all around lug a great deal of heavy weaponry and equipment. But the heaviest items are intangible things such as their emotions, shame, and reputations.
The short story, “The Things They Carried” was written by author Tim O'Brien in an unusual pattern. It contains a non-linear narrative of a short period in the life of a military unit active in Vietnam during the late 1960's, punctuated by an astonishingly vast inventory of items carried by each of the soldiers. The piece begins by introducing narrative and inventory items in somewhat separated sections, but as the story evolves the two categories become more and more mixed together, until it becomes apparent that who they are and what they are carrying are one and the same. It also becomes apparent that, in order for the unit's members to do the job they were sent to Vietnam to do, they need to streamline what they carry – only take what is needed to survive, dispose of the rest. This applies in a physical sense, where added weight can make them less physically effective, and also in an emotional/metaphysical sense, where the heavy psychic burden of trying to survive the day-to-day life of a warrior leaves no space for “extras”. In O'Brien's tale, there is an underlying question in all that he presents – what is a necessity, and what needs to be disposed of?
In the literal sense O’Brien talks about what different members of a platoon in Vietnam carried. This helps him to move to a more symbolic sense at the end of the story. He starts by talking about necessities and slowly moves on to what they carried to remind them that there was a world out side of the war. “Among the necessities or near necessities were p-38 can openers, pocket knifes, heat tabs, wrist watches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water.” But as the story moves on it shows other things that were considered necessities to them even though to some one else they might seem a luxury. Such as Kiowa carrying his grandfather’s hatchet. These are obviously not necessities to others but were one for them. In the story the theme of weight kept coming up. Literally he meant the weight of each weapon, ration, and body armor, ECT… “it was SOP for each man to carry a steel-centered, nylon-covered flak jacket, which weight 6.7 pounds…” Weight is used in this story to help show the symbolic meaning of weight later on in the story. “What they carried varied by mission.” Knowing the different dangers throughout the land also added to their burden, making them carry even more such as mosquito netting, machetes, mine detectors, and even things that didn’t have much use such as Kiowa carrying the New Testament and Dave Jensen carrying his night-sight vitamins. All of “The Things They Carried” helped to add to the stress of the war and also help to quell it, they carried what they needed.
Used throughout the story, the word weight is the most paramount word in the story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O'Brien. It shows the emotional, physical, and revisionary impacts that the Vietnam War had on adolescent men, and how they have to carry the physical and poignant weight for and towards the war. This word emphasizes the burden men carry and how the war’s weight is a catalyst for a man to change.. Each man had the burden of bearing a disparate amount of weight during the war. It is the weight of war that impinges on a man.
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, written by the talented author Chris Hedges, gives us provoking thoughts that are somewhat painful to read but at the same time are quite personal confessions. Chris Hedges, a talented journalist to say the least, brings nearly 15 years of being a foreign correspondent to this book and subjectively concludes how all of his world experiences tie together. Throughout his book, he unifies themes present in all wars he experienced first hand. The most important themes I was able to draw from this book were, war skews reality, dominates culture, seduces society with its heroic attributes, distorts memory, and supports a cause, and allures us by a constant battle between death and love.
Steven Kaplan in his critical essay said that “O’Brien depicts all the “things” that appear in the first chapter in a precise, scientific style”. Meaning that O’Brien shares how much each thing the solider carries weighs either physically or psychologically. For example, “ On their feet they carried jungle boots-2.1-pounds and Dave Jenson carried three pairs of socks and a can of Dr. Scholl’s food powder as a precaution against trench foot”. (Page 114) Also in The Things They Carried, O’Brien mentions how much the artillery weighted right down to the ounce. For example, “ Jimmy Cross carried a compass, maps, a code book, binoculars, and a .45 caliber pistol that weighted 2.9 pounds fully loaded. The reason O’Brien puts the weights into the story is because he wants to show the hardship these soldiers went through and how they pushed through it. This proves the facts and memory interpretation because the things could really weigh that much, but on the other hand the soldiers can think they weight more than normal because of other factors like the heat. For instance, “ It was SOP for each man to carry a steel-centered, nylon-covered flak jacket, which weighted 6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier. (Page 115)
There is a major change in the men in this novel. At first, they are excited to join the army in order to help their country. After they see the truth about war, they learn very important assets of life such as death, destruction, and suffering. These emotions are learned in places like training camp, battles, and hospitals. All the men, dead or alive, obtained knowledge on how to deal with death, which is very important to one’s life.
War always seems to have no end. A war between countries can cross the world, whether it is considered a world war or not. No one can be saved from the reaches of a violent war, not even those locked in a safe haven. War looms over all who recognize it. For some, knowing the war will be their future provides a reason for living, but for others the war represents the snatching of their lives without their consent. Every reaction to war in A Separate Peace is different, as in life. In the novel, about boys coming of age during World War II, John Knowles uses character development, negative diction, and setting to argue that war forever changes the way we see the world and forces us to mature rapidly.
One of the most overlooked aspects in the life of a soldier is the weight of the things they carry. In Tim O'Brien's story, "The Things They Carried," O'Brien details the plight of Vietnam soldiers along with how they shoulder the numerous burdens placed upon them. Literally, the heavy supplies weigh down each soldier -- but the physical load imposed on each soldier symbolizes the psychological baggage a soldier carries during war. Though O'Brien lists the things each soldier carries, the focal point centers around the leader, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, and his roles in the war. Lt. Cross has multiple burdens, but his emotional baggage is the most pressing. Of all the weights burdened upon Lt. Cross, the heaviest baggage is located in his own mind. Specifically, the heaviest things Lt. Cross carries are an emotional obsession over Martha's love, the physical consequences caused by his daydreaming of Martha, and an unrelenting guilt about Ted Lavender's death.
This short story does not follow a traditional short story. All the nuances in this story make it a pretty unique piece. It follows a poetic structure at times, yet some passages are their own short story themselves. This follows a chaotic structure, and goes well with the setting (Vietnam War). O’Brien shows the chaos of War and integrates into every part of his