Emotions In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

In The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien uses many short stories to describe his experience in Vietnam. The story that captured many aspects of writing was “How to Tell a True War Story” because it acts as a guide to writing a true story. O’Brien uses many different rhetorical strategies, narrative techniques, and establishes a theme in this story to help develop his characters and story line.

In “The Things They Carried” Tim O’Brien uses this story as a coping mechanism; to tell part of his stories and others that are fiction from the Vietnamese War. This is shown by using a fictions character’s voice, deeper meaning in what soldier’s carried, motivation in decision making, telling a war story, becoming a new person and the outcome of a war in one person. Tim O’ Brien uses a psychological approach to tell his sorrows, and some happiness from his stories from the war. Each part, each story is supposed to represent a deeper meaning on how O’Brien dealt, and will deal with his past. In war, a way to

In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien the author tells about his experiences in the Vietnam war by telling various war stories. The quote, "It has been said of war that it is a world where the past has a strong grip on the present, where machines seemed sometimes to have more will power than me, where nice boys (girls) were attracted to them, where bodies ruptured and burned and stand, where the evil thing trying to kill you could look disconnecting human and where except in your imagination it was impossible to be heroic." relates to each of his stories.

Most stories about war show the glory of war and heroism of soldiers. According to OED, war is “a state of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within a nation or state”. But, what’s the definition about the stage of confusions in the soldier’s mind? A conflict between two nations or states can be resolved in a particular amount of time but can an experience from a person’s mind can ever be forgotten, can a person ever be able to resolve his own conflict: his fight with his emotions, changes, and his own mind? Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a powerful combination of fact and fiction; through description and imagination, O’Brien allows the reader to feel a soldier's hardships in the war and

this well said quote by Marshall McLuhan shows that civilians of America did not and will not know what happened on the battlefields. With the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, this proves just what the Veterans of Vietnam actually went through. With the psychological approach, one can see how PTSD affected many veterans, how loved ones were affected by the war, and how Tim O’Brien changed throughout the war. This proves that the war not only changed the veterans from Vietnam but actually the world around them.

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien provides an account of his time in the Vietnam War with memories and anecdotes in order to evoke emotion from the reader. Throughout the war, O’Brien sees instances of courage and cowardice within himself and his fellow platoon cronies. The title of his work signifies what the soldiers carried with them to the war and what they continue to carry after the war. O’Brien carries the shame of his inability to abscond from his call to serve in the United States Army because of his concern for his reputation. This initial act of cowardice sets up how O’Brien thinks of himself as a soldier and overshadows all courageous actions with this singular pusillanimous decision to join a movement that he wanted no part in while the characters who represent true courage admit their faults and embrace their humanity.

The Vietnam War was a long, hard, and destructive war. The Vietnam War scarred O’Brien very much and he felt a way to escape from his memories and experiences were to write them down and create them into a story. I know this because the whole novel had to do with the experiences that O’Brien had gone through and at the end of the novel he saw that him writing “The Things They Carry” as “Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story” meaning that it was almost as though writing about his experiences brought back his innocence and happiness that he had as a child that the war had stripped him from.

In The Things They Carried, characters Tim O’Brien, Lieutenant Cross, and Norman Bowker deal with guilt in various ways, much like soldier might experience. In the chapter Ambush, O’Brien felt completely guilty by killing a Vietnam soldier with a hand grenade, where he possibly could’ve let the soldier pass by. In the chapter In the Field, Lieutenant Cross felt guilty by leading his soldiers into an unsafe place, that lead to Kiowa’s death. In the chapter Speaking of Courage, Bowker feels guilty by letting Kiowa, a good friend of his, die in the mud field. All three soldiers have had different circumstances, but all three feel guilt in different ways.

The Things They Carried is a novel written by Tim O’Brien about the events and occurrences of one of the greatest points in the history of the United States, the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was an extremely bloody and deadly war that cost thousands of American soldiers their lives. Many people, civilians and soldiers, found the United States participation in the Vietnam War as wrong and controversial. Tim O’Brien uses metafiction to write this book, which portrays a blurred line between fiction and nonfiction stating true facts from his days as a foot soldier in Vietnam and fictional stories of heroic yet tragic moments. I was not in favor of his

The feeling of guilt or shame was brought up in this book multiple times. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross was feeling shame after Ted Lavender had been shot and killed. Norman Bowker was guilty after letting Kiowa go because he could not stand the smell in the field. The narrator, Tim O’Brien, even felt regret after not doing anything to stand up for Linda when he was younger. Guilt or regret stays with someone because they always think about what they could have changed and not what they can do going forward. That is what makes these feelings the heaviest of things they can carry.

War zones are infamous for truly debilitating soldiers both mentally and physically. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the personal war experiences of the soldiers illustrate the diminution of the value and ability to retain morals in the Vietnam War. Morals always exist but they are obstructed due to the soldiers’ desire to tell a good war story. Tim O’Brien the character seems to find little importance in extracting morals from stories, and Tim O’Brien the author stresses on minute details, focusing on imagery and drama rather than dwelling on morality. Although the author and soldiers are constantly telling stories and being reminded that morals exist from Mitchell Sanders, they lose their ability to distinguish between moral

In the book, “The Things We Carried” Tim O’Brien addresses how war changes the human psyche when the mind is in a vulnerable state, by showing that the soldiers talk to an old man that is dead in a village, and by O’Brien seeing people that are dead like Linda, Ted Lavender, and Kiowa. Throughout the book, O’Brien shows all the tragedies and hardships he has experienced in the war, as well as the people around him. He shows the deaths he has witnessed, like Ted Lavender getting shot in the face, or when Kiowa drowned in sewage in the banks of the Song Tra Bong. There was also the time Lee strunk died after stepping on a landmine. These events in O'Brien's life made his mind(human psyche) change by showing life and death as a connection .

The Vietnam War was a prolong struggle of communist faction forcing unification of north and South Vietnam. To prevent the spread of communism the United States allied with the South Vietnamese to fight back against the communist faction. The Vietnam War span over 18 years it was apparent that there was no way in winning the war. The U.S leaders lost the support of the American people in fighting a war we can’t win. The U.S leaders thought up and created an elite peace keeping force called the Green Berets. The Green Berets gained a lot of attention to the media through books, music, and movies. A compilation of short stories of the Vietnam War by Tim O’Brien is one of those books. In Tim O’Brien book

Stories can save people as in the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien short story Spin “ Rat Kiley made up a rhyme that caught on, and we'd all be chanting it together: Step out of line, hit a mine; follow the dink, you're in the pink. All around us, the place was littered with Bouncing Betties and Toe Poppers and booby-trapped artillery rounds, but in those five days on the Batangan Peninsula nobody got hurt. We all learned to love the old man. (Spin.8)”. The thing They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a novel with a series of short stories about his journey in Vietnam and he tell us that stories can bring people back from the dead by always telling their story.

The Vietnam War began in 1954 and came to an end in 1975. It was a conflict that set in opposition the communist regime of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong