Analysis of I Am the Grass

Generals Die in Bed certainly demonstrates that war is futile and the soldiers suffer both emotionally and physically. Charles Yale Harrison presents a distressing account of the soldiers fighting in the Western front, constantly suffering and eventually abandoning hope for an end to the horrors that they experience daily. The ‘boys’ who went to war became ‘sunk in misery’. We view the war from the perspective of a young soldier who remains nameless. The narrator’s experience displays the futility and horror of war and the despair the soldiers suffered. There is no glory in

“The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed” (O’Brien 68). In Tim O'Brien's’ novel, The Things They Carried, the author creates an overall reflection of war and the memories that come from the experiences. O’Brien describes his experiences in the Vietnam War and how the outcomes can lead to PTSD. Soldiers can not possibly capture these experiences in literal truth, but by storytelling. Tim kills an enemy and feels the guilt from it, so he makes up a backstory for

“Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice”, focuses on the relationship between the protagonist, who is referred to as ‘Child’, and his father, referred to as ‘Ba’. The opening story follows the protagonist as he is struggling to overcome writers block, whilst dealing with his estranged Vietnamese father who is visiting. A number of flashbacks are used as a literary device to divulge into the protagonists past with his father as well as the fathers past. This reveals, not only an abusive past with his father, but also his father’s memories of the Vietnam war. It becomes clear that the son makes excuses for his father, with his girlfriend Linda also noting this, “I think you’re making excuses for him…You’re romanticising his past to make sense of the things you said he did to you” (pp.20). The protagonist reflects this himself, making the excuse that “he was a soldier” (pp.13), and that is why his father treated him as he did. The protagonist, despite once being able to admit to Linda that his father abused him, can no longer admit this, as his relationship with his father grows, and it can be argued that he is willing to overlook his past in an attempt to reconcile with his father. “It was too much these words, and what connected to them” (pp.13).

The text, ‘The Things They Carried', is an excellent example which reveals how individuals are changed for the worse through their first hand experience of war. Following the lives of the men both during and after the war in a series of short stories, the impact of the war is accurately portrayed, and provides a rare insight into the guilt stricken minds of soldiers. ‘The Things They Carried' shows the impact of the war in its many forms: the suicide of an ex-soldier upon his return home; the lessening sanity of a medic as the constant death surrounds him; the trauma and guilt of all the soldiers after seeing their friends die, and feeling as if they could have saved them; and the deaths of the soldiers, the most negative impact a war

The returning of a dramatic event disables a soldier to adapt accordingly to everyday life. Ones conscious of reality is infringed upon Posttraumatic experiences of warfare, which unleashes an outbreak of inhumane actions directed towards existence and significant others. As the short story progresses after the event of the Vietnam War, the narrator says referring to Henry that:

Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War is a novel that is a personal view of the Vietnam War from the perspective of a Vietnamese soldier. Like the American novel “The things they carried”, this novel brings about the effects of war on people, and especially how it defeats the human capacity for things such as love and hope. Bao Ninh offers this realistic picture of the Vietnam War’s impact on the individual Vietnamese soldier through use of a series of reminiscences or flashbacks, jumping backwards and forwards in time between the events most salient in memory, events which take on a different theme each time they are examined. His main protagonist Kien, who is basically Bao himself, looks back not just at his ten years at

Can a change that was caused by a particular experience be described from a particular perspective? Can a horrible truth be expressed in words how it felt as a feeling? Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a collection of stories about his service in the Vietnam War, raises exactly such questions, and in remembering, O’Brien endeavors to answer them for himself.

Soldiers may not always be prepared to return to their civilian life after witnessing danger and casualties while being away. Some seemed to deal with it by keeping their mind busy with pastime activities such as writing, while others just cannot imagine a future after. Tim O’Brien is one of the people who found writing as a way to exercise the mind and break free. The Things They Carried is considered to be O’Brien’s way to release his memories and stories in order to move on with life. He is now forty-three years old and still writes

In this paper I will argue that in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried during the war a person experience develop guilt from an event that happened during the war and how it affects them for life. The three people specifically, I will take about are First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, and Tim. Telling about how the experienced guilt, where the guilt comes from, and if they ever find absolution.

Imagine being suddenly drafted to war, not prepared for the death and horror. Young, confused, scared, naïve. During the Vietnam War, many young men were forced to face a war that changed them, and not necessarily for the better. Many of the men who went to war experienced terrors that changed them in a way that affected their lives after, as shown by countless war stories and poems. Norman Bowker, from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), is a perfect example of the hard-bitten war veteran archetype. Fighting in the Vietnam War and feeling as if he had a part in his friend’s death (Kiowa) caused him so much guilt and pain that he ended up hanging himself after endlessly driving around a lake when returning home. Similarly, Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem, “The Dead at Quang Tri”, emphasizes the ghosts that haunt soldiers during and after war. Overall, the haunting memories that characters deal with in war stories, like O’Brien and Komunyakaa’s, display the long lasting effects of death and war on the minds of soldiers.

People often feel embarrassed because they believe what they do are wrong. In The Things They Carried, the conflicts in emotions of the soldiers highlight the theme of embarrassment. For instance, O’Brien in “On the Rainy River” is ashamed because he decides to go to the Vietnam War and escapes his real ideals. In “Speaking of Courage,” Norman Bowker is embarrassed because he has saved himself instead of saving his friend Kiowa from death. Indeed, the theme of embarrassment plays an essential role in The Things They Carried because shame greatly affects the complexity of the soldiers’ decisions and emotions before and after the war.

Tim O’Brien frequently recalls back on memories, adding backstories to small details. During the war due to high pressure and tension, Tim purposely overlooked a lot of the sensory details of the dead bodies to avoid the guilt and trauma of killing another person. In Good From, Tim O’Brien reveals the difference between happening truth and story truth by giving examples of the two, “Here is the happening-truth...There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.”(121) Tim feels severe guilt for killing people in Vietnam but never formally recognizing them as an actual human being. To reconcile for his killings, Tim provides a backstory for all the people he killed. He created the story with the man with the star shaped hole as a representation for the actual people he killed. He wanted the people he killed to be viewed as real people with facial features. After his happening truth statement, Tim O’Brien follows up with “the story-truth... His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.”(121) By substituting the dead with an actual human figure, Tim can provide a character for he and the readers to empathy with. Tim O’Brien can finally recover by recognizing and honoring the dead soldiers he killed as well as extend their story to a broader audiences. Brien concludes the chapter by saying that“ “What stories can do... is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at.”(121) Tim affirms that he feel humans and alive again by having emotions. The ability to feel grief for the dead allows Tim to reflect the past and move forward with his

Vietnam war veteran and novelist Tim O’Brien, in his piece titled, “The Things They Carried,” portrays personal war stories of a group of soldiers during the Vietnam War to convey how stories and memories can aid in coping with death. The novel was extremely emotional and thought provoking, causing me to question what was real or not, and how these stories were more than just stories. As the novel progressed, it became increasingly clear how, for O’Brien and some of the other soldiers, these stories were not just stories for the them to reminisce on, they were a form of therapy, helping them to live on, even when faced with death and morbid experiences. Through these various stories ranging from the distant past and the present, O’Brien successfully

The effects of this issue are further reflected upon in Tim O’Brien’s war story The Things They Carried, where Vietnam War era veteran O’Brien narrates his fictional account of the war and its effects on its combatants as a way to cope with the inflicted grief and regret of battle. Throughout the story and through other veterans’ accounts, it is evident how storytelling can be an effective medium to assuage these mental effects of war on a veteran. Most prominently, war’s effects on soldiers are mainly physical with disabilities causing a lasting effect on those who once fought and now wish to adapt to civilian life. However, the idea of not being able to adapt completely lies with the lesser known effects of war inflicted disabilities, with PTSD mentally scarring soldiers for periods of their life and depression following suit. Like how hospitals and bandages heal bullet wounds, O’Brien proves how writing and storytelling serve as remedies to patch up the mental wounds caused by war.

The profound author and voice actor Tsom Bodett once said “In school you are taught a lesson and then given a test, in life you are given a test then taught a lesson”. This is one of my favorite quotes because of how true it is. In the book Tall Grass all of the characters have arguably learned many lessons, but the character who I believe learned the most valuable one is Rennie and how she learned to accept people for who they are.