'Brien's Injury In The Things They Carried By O' Brien

The items the soldiers carry hold a substantial amount of credibility throughout each personal story; however, within O’Brien’s story, he lacks credibility aside from the obvious tangible elements of the items held, questioning where the truth lies within these evidential fragments of the soldiers’ lives. These personal accounts of exact measurements attest the reader’s knowledge of war as well as the mental ability to calculate the exact weight upon each person’s hump through a fiction of mental and emotional agility. O’Brien quotes within Chen’s criticism stating, “A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe” (Chen 77). This background knowledge of O’Brien’s theory that an “absolute occurrence is irrelevant because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth,”(Chen 77) places the credibility of the information upon the emotional accounts that O’Brien’s writing bestows upon the personalities of the soldiers. The “academic tone that at times makes the narrative sound like a government report (Kaplan 45),” adds documentation like analysis of these compilations of war endeavors as told by the narrator. Kaplan continues that the “transitional phrases such as “for instance” and “in addition,”’ (Kaplan 45) as well as “whole paragraphs dominated by sentences that begin with “because,”” (Kaplan 45) convince certainty of the

Though the men reacted in violent ways in different situations, O’Brian’s violent act was something that stayed with him for the rest of his life and completely changed who he was as a person. “The Man I Killed” describes in detail the man and his life Tim O’Brien killed on a path in the jungle, even though he obviously did not know the man’s personal background, but mimicked it after his own. This description shows O’Brien’s life came to an end at his first act of violence, mirrored in the loss of the man’s life. After O’Brien’s incident on the pathway, he became cold and exemplified this new disposition after Jorgenson almost allowed O’Brien to die from a bullet wound, and in turn O’Brien needed pay back by scaring him in the middle of the night. The war may have physically killed many, but in this sense it damaged every soldier mentally.

The new soldiers’ resistance was usually followed by an attempt to flee which brought shame and embarrassment to both the new soldiers and their families. Subsequent to the attempt to flee came a final adoption to the war in which O’Brien and many others tried so hard to get out of. O’Brien uses elements such as conflict, imagery, and tone to help convey his

He lay with one leg bent beneath him, his jaw in his throat, his face neither expressive nor inexpressive. One eye was shut. The other was a star shaped hole.” (124). Tim had never killed before; the man he is describing here was his first official kill. O’Brien stared straight into the dead man’s eyes for a long period of time, unsure of how to cope with the situation.

The short story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien used many different types of literary devices. Imagery is used to illustrate the war in a descriptive way. Figurative and literal language is used to describe the things that the soldiers carried with them; physically and emotionally. Some of the things that the soldiers carried with them were symbols of luck. Personification was used when mentioning these good lucks symbols and it was also used to describe the dead. Alliteration was used in the short story to emphasize the sound of how fast life could end while being at war.

The Things They Carried is a war story based on the Vietnam War. One story the author, Tim O 'Brien tells is the story of Mary Anne, Mark Fossie’s childhood sweetheart. Mary Anne’s curiosity allows her to acquire knowledge about Vietnam’s culture and language. She wants to learn about Vietnam, the war and what they do. She also isn’t afraid and is eager to aid the casualties. One night she goes out on an ambition with the Green Berets, and the next day she and Fossie become engaged. Eventually she disappears for 3 weeks only to arrive at the special forces hut, and when seen Mary Anne is wearing the same outfit as before, but with a necklace of human tongues around her neck. She says what happened isn’t bad. In the end, she crossed to the other side never coming back, becoming one with the land. Mary Anne symbolizes war soldiers going through the war getting consumed by the darkness of the war.

At the same time, O’Brien struggles with destructiveness of the conflicting images of violence and peace in death through the juxtaposition of the imagery of the dead man. While “his one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole.” The dead man has one shut eye that resembles a peaceful sleep, while the other side is obliterated by the grenade into a star-shaped hole. The image of the star-shaped hole in the dead soldier’s eye represents the hopes that he once had when he was alive: “He hoped the Americans would go away. Soon, he hoped. He kept hoping and hoping, always” (119). Furthermore, “his right cheek was smooth and hairless,” an image of untouched innocence that contrasts with his left cheek, which was “peeled back in three ragged strips,” destroyed by the violence O’Brien inflicts upon it. The juxtaposition of the butterfly that settles on his chin and the fatal wound on his neck, “open to the spinal cord…blood…thick and shiny” illustrate the complexity and ambiguity of the unnaturalness of war, depicted by the image of the dead man’s wrung neck, contrasted with the ironic peace and naturalism of death in the image of the fragile butterfly. These select images are also those that O’Brien chooses to fixate upon and develop throughout the chapter as he struggles to comprehend the moral implications of his actions. The innocence of the “slim, dead, almost dainty young man” is further reinforced when O’Brien describes his wrists as “wrists of a

In the story The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien didn’t mention anything about traditional war heroes. I think this was a great idea, because there are no traditional war heroes. A traditional war hero is someone who is fearless and someone who can’t be harmed mentally or emotionally. But in The Things They Carried the soldiers out on the front lines were emotionally and physically scarred. Tim O’Brien didn’t write about traditional war heroes, O’Brien wrote about normal people, people with different views on the Vietnam war, and how the war affected these people.

Death defines life; it has the ability to reinvent the living for better or worse. “The Things They Carried”, by Tim O’Brien, provides a non-linear, semi-fictitious account of the Vietnam War that poignantly depicts the complicated relationship between life and death. His account breathes subtle vitality and realism into the lingering presence of the dead, intimating that the memories they impart have as profound an impact as the living.

O’Brien’s use of imagery allows him to paint a vivid depiction of the horrors experienced by the foot soldiers in Vietnam. These horrors perpetuate the physical and emotional

In the short stories “The Man I Killed” and “Ambush,” one of Tim O’Brien’s purposes is to describe how society wrongfully portrays soldiers gain a sense of pride and victory when they take lives of other human beings instead of the guilt-driven battle they have to deal with for the rest of their lives. O’Brien tries to disprove this theory and instead show they are actually stuck with this tragedy for the rest of their lives as they lose their innocence and sense of humanity. O’Brien shows this through the use of imagery to portray and help develop this concept/theme. O’Brien describes through vivid imagery and details in, “The Man I Killed,” the dead man’s eye, “His one eye shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole” (118). Here O’Brien uses this imagery to symbolize the star shape of the dead man’s eye as a sign of hope as a shooting star, yet, he ties this beautiful image with death, to show that his hope/future has betrayed him. O’Brien purposefully places this star-shaped wound on the soldier's eye, for it is with the eyes that both the dead man and O’Brien gaze upon the stars in the sky. As if he was gazing more upon the stars, upon his future, which in this case his future comes to an end with O’Brien’s fatal doing. O’Brien’s innocence has left him as he has become in a sense “dirty” after taking this man’s life. So, in this case, O’Brien has not taken this killing with pride and victory, but with sadness and guilt. This goes back to his purpose to show that soldiers

In “Ghost Soldiers,” O’Brien struggles with feelings of revenge and remorse. O’Brien demonstrates how the feelings of revenge and remorse can take over a person. In the chapter “Ghost Soldiers,” O’Brien describes the two times he was shot. O’Brien compares how Rat Kiley retreated him when he was first shot and how he felt better after his treatment. Jorgenson treated O’Brien the second time he was shot, but he was not pleased with the treatment. O’Brien felt that he did not received the care he wanted by Jorgenson. As a result of Jorgenson bad care, O’Brien had to deal with painful gangrene and uncomfortable medicine. O’Brien hated Jorgenson due to his negligent treatment; that’s why O’Brien started wanting revenge.” I felt something shift

In the novel, The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien there is an ambiguity assigned to the life of a soldier in the Vietnam war, an ambiguity that represents no clear moral victor, no clear heroes, and seemingly no end. In the movie, Platoon, written and directed by Oliver Stone, the same ambiguity is depicted, with no clear moral direction, no clear heroes, and no clear resolution. In the short story, “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien talks in great detail about how a true war story, and not some reimagining, “is never moral” (O’Brien) and “cannot be believed” (O’Brien). According to O’Brien, the movie Platoon will qualify as a true war story because it is not moral, hard to believe, and has no clear resolution.

Within chapter twelve, “The Man I Killed”, O’Brien starts off with the introduction of “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole”(118). This grotesque image is one of the symbols representing war because it portrays death. The author starts of with the symbolism of death through the grotesque image of a man because it reminds the reader definition of war. The author is able to show the presence of life to death through the man’s “lightly freckled”(118) forehead to a forehead “spotted with small dark freckles”(121). The light freckles represents impurity and life as the dark freckles represents death. The transition of life to death is shown with the different colors

In this story, O’Brien vividly describes a young Vietnamese man he ambushed as well as the life he may have lived. Within the first sentence it’s apparent O’Brien is shocked about what he’s just done; and that even goes so far into the structure of the sentence itself by being broken up by multiple commas. I believe this was purposely done to show his pattern of thoughts, or his way of processing the current situation and its outcome: “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole…” (88). It was as if he had a checklist of some sort and he was going down the list. Further past the opening statement, the other soldiers tried to talk to him. One said he “laid [the man]