Fantasy In The Things They Carried

They carry many things, they carry a massive amount of weight on their shoulders. However, the heaviest thing that they carry cannot be touched. The intangible weight of fear, loss, anger, and guilt far outweigh any tangible item that they could possibly possess. The Thing They Carried is not only an eye-opening collection of war stories, but it is also a love story, a memoir, and a tribute to the unimaginable things that happen to our soldiers in war zones. War changes men, makes them different, and when they come home they are not the same person and they often have trouble readjusting to the life of a civilian.

In, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, there is a quote “they all carried ghosts.”, this metaphor can represent the many things the soldiers carried. Every soldier carries things that represent memories or security. In war, the soldiers are confronted with death every day so they carry things that remind them of people, memories, or hope.

Tim O’Brien’s book “The Things They Carried” epitomizes the degradation of morals that war produces. This interpretation is personified in the characters who gradually blur the line dividing right and wrong as the motives for war itself become unclear. The morality of soldiers and the purpose of war are tied also to the truth the soldiers must tell themselves in order to participate in the gruesome and random killing which is falsely justified by the U.S government. The lack of purpose in the Vietnam War permanently altered the soldier’s perspective of how to react to situations and in most cases they turned to violence to express their frustration.

In Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”, O’Brien created several allusions that each character endured during the Vietnam War. Throughout the story were vast representations of the things soldiers carried both mentally and physically. The things they carried symbolized their individual roles internally and externally. In addition to symbolism, imagination was a focal theme that stood out amongst the characters. This particular theme played a role as the silent killer amongst Lt. Cross and the platoon both individually and collectively as a group. The theme of imagination created an in depth look of how the war was perceived through each character which helped emphasize their thoughts from an emotional stand point of being young men out at war.

The Vietnam War began in 1954, consisting of many extensive, horrific years of battle that seemed to create more harm to the United States and its soldiers rather than to North Vietnam. The 500,000 United States military personnel returned home with the loss of the war and the loss of their friends on their minds. Although the physical and emotional experiences that the men went through is unfathomable, Tim O’Brien does a great job portraying what life as a soldier was truly like in the Vietnam War. In the book The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien depicts the unstable emotional and psychological condition of the American soldiers through the symbolism of their belongings and personal anecdotes from their lives.

"The Things They Carried," is a story about drafted soldiers during the Vietnam era who were sent to the Vietnam War. The author, Tim O’Brien, describes the things that the men carry during their tour of duty. The items carried are both physical and impalpable items and what these things are is subject to the individual soldier. They carry the necessities for survival in the jungles of Vietnam as well as the personal things each soldier feels necessary to make life as comfortable as possible. Additionally, each of the men carries the memories and fears of past and present experiences. The heaviness of the impalpable items is as tangible as that of any physical item, and not so easy to cast away. The literary argument in which the novel

The soldiers didn't even have to have gone home to begin to feel the effects of the war. Rat Kiley, a young medic in Vietnam started to feel the effects right then and there, and it resulted in him shooting himself in order to escape the war. The conditions of the war, the long night time treks, the silence, broken only by the sounds of ghosts, the constant darkness. It could drive anyone crazy. The constant death too, ‘… too many body bags… too much gore…'. Sometimes this paranoia-based insanity would embody itself in the form of something randomly chosen yet relevant, something for the person to obsess about in order to temporarily distance themselves from what was actually occurring around them. At times the obsessing would involve their immediate surrounds, like Rat Kiley who began to those around him as nothing more than bodies, and began to imagine how they would look without an arm, or a leg, or even ‘… what it would feel like to pick up the head and carry it over to a chopper and dump it in…'. It could even take form as self obsession, Rat Kiley began to envision his own death, parts of his own body being removed and eaten by the insects in Vietnam. Kiley's constant visions led to his self-harming in order to be taken away to Japan, some kind of a haven after the

While the Vietnam War was a complex political pursuit that lasted only a few years, the impact of the war on millions of soldiers and civilians extended for many years beyond its termination. Soldiers killed or were killed; those who survived suffered from physical wounds or were plagued by PTSD from being wounded, watching their platoon mates die violently or dealing with the moral implications of their own violence on enemy fighters. Inspired by his experiences in the war, Tim O’Brien, a former soldier, wrote The Things They Carried, a collection of fictional and true war stories that embody the

The Things They Carried is more than just a story about the Vietnam war. A focus has been placed on the real soldiers who lived through it. With the use of repetition, figurative language, and described imagery O’Brien is able to illustrates his story. WIth these three things, we are able to understand the physical and emotional side of a soldier at war.

In the book The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, contains few surrealism, due to writing the story 20 years after the war happened. In How to Tell a War Story, it contains the story about Bob Rat Kileyś friend, Curt Lemon, got killed and he writes a letter to the friend´s sister, ¨Rat sits down and writes a letter to the guy's sister¨ (64). When she did not wrote letter back, she did not write anything back, So he wrote another one, however, because she did not write anything back, he was frustrated at first, but later assumed that she is in moral of her brotherś death. In this situation, there seem to be some surrealism because O'Brien and Rat Kiley would never know if she really did not wrote the letter back because she in moral of her

In the first chapter in the book, titled The Things They Carried, Jimmy Cross is one of the many examples throughout the novel in where a soldier has a way to escape from the realities of war. Cross, who is a lieutenant in his company, carries two photographs of a girl named Martha whom he truly loves and wishes nothing else but to be with her in the end. Along with the photographs, he carries letters from Martha herself as well as her good-luck pebble in his mouth. Martha’s letters has a huge impact on Cross’s escape on reality because those letters do not mention war at all but for him to stay safe. All of these items comforts Cross and eventually reminisce about the times when he was back home with Martha away from any war. He relives a moment when he was with Martha at the movies, and then remembers that he touched her knee but Martha did not approve and pushed his hands away. Now while he’s in Vietnam, he does nothing but fantasizes taking her to her bed, tying her up, and touching that one knee knee all night long.

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.

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.

The Vietnam War. A war that many Americans believed unfair and unnecessary. “Why am I being sent off to fight in a war I don’t know anything about? Will I ever return again?” Many draftees asked themselves these questions hoping to find comfort in the answers. But there was little to no hope, and they knew it. They were being drafted and they could do absolutely nothing about it, only hope that at the end they would be returning to the enlightened faces of their loved ones, something that not many Vietnam soldiers expected to ever see again. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, portrays his experience in the war along with his fellow squad members, in their fight for survival against the Vietcong. In The Things They Carried, each

It can be hard to fully comprehend the effects the Vietnam War had on not just the veterans, but the nation as a whole. The violent battles and acts of war became all too common during the long years of the conflict. The war warped the soldiers and civilians characters and desensitized their mentalities to the cruelty seen on the battlefield. Bao Ninh and Tim O’Brien, both veterans of the war, narrate their experiences of the war and use the loss of love as a metaphor for the detrimental effects of the years of fighting.