Tim O Brien's Style Analysis

O’Brien’s Style of Writing in The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien was one of the soldiers in the Vietnam War. He wrote a story of what happened during the war. He wrote of The Things They Carried, Love, Spin, On the Rainy River, and Enemies & Friends among others. In The Things They Carried, O’Brien wrote about guilt. He explained that cowardice made soldiers guilty and this compelled them to go to fight even though they were not willing to do it.
O’Brien wrote that soldiers go to war because they are compelled to and if they refuse to go they are seen as cowards. Soldiers have an emotional baggage of risk of dying. O’Brien ran away from his hometown to the Canadian border so that people in his area could not see him as a coward. O’Brien killed a man when he found him carrying a weapon. He felt guilty of his act but his fellow soldiers told him that killing was the right thing to do since the young man had a weapon and he could have been killed by another soldier. O’Brien realized that men did unspeakable things under impulse and peer pressure (O’Brien, 10). He alluded that the greatest fear of all soldiers is not killing or even death but simple embarrassment.

Bowker sent O’Brien a letter asking for a story as he wanted to explain his feelings of disillusionment and frustration but didn’t know what to say. O’Brien got inspired by the letter as it helped him to cope with his traumatic experiences during the war. O’Brien revealed that storytelling gave a fleeing sensation which was more important than the objective truth of the story (O’Brien, 10). O’Brien proved that in storytelling, factual truth is not as important as emotional truth. He alluded this to what he said that the story he gave were may be entirely made up forcing his listeners to decide whether his characters and contentions were valid or were simply made