How Do You Deal With Grief?

War changes the lives of each and every soldier who participates. It continues to change the way they experience events and the way their perception of the simplest things. Many veterans do not realize what truly happened until much later in life, if at all. Many live in denial of the truth, consciously or subconsciously, and many continuously remember their darkest moments. This is the case in “Salem”, written by Robert Olen Butler. The short story is about a man, late in life, recalling a past event from the Vietnam War. He remembers a man, alone in a clearing, whose life he ended. He starts to understand his actions and their true outcomes. The author uses symbolism, setting, and character to enhance the idea that one should always be aware of how his/her actions affect others.

It is very apparent that Tim O’Brien, as of writing this story, is afflicted with what we now call PTSD. This is shown by how quickly the story turns from him being at home with his daughter, to back on the battlefield in the Vietnam War. He goes into great detail about this event. From the weather and environment, to him and his partner taking watch shifts, even to how the man he killed looked and what he was wearing. If you have PTSD one of the side effects is having unwanted memories of your experiences. It is shown that Tim has this by the sentence “I’ll look up and see the young man coming out of the morning fog.” He will be at home, sitting on the sofa reading a newspaper, but when he looks up he can see the man he killed. This is an unwanted memory to him. Having PTSD has truly taken a toll on Mr. O’Brien. He has since moved on, but he can never truly forget that experience. He tries to forget but he simply cannot due to his condition. “Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don’t,” is what he writes in his story “Ambush” as he tells of his struggles with PTSD. If he told his daughter what happened, not only would he most likely not be able to stop talking and describing the situation he was thrust into, but he would also remember the gunshots and explosions. He would be back on the battlefield. He would maybe even try to harm his wife or daughter due to

Tim O’Brien has his friend, Norman Bowker, tell the story of his friend Kiowa dying because he was so astonished at what he just watched happen that words couldn’t come out of his mouth. One of Tim O’Brien and Norman Bowker’s friends’, Kiowa, was hit by a mortar and begin to sink in the quicksand-like mud of the battlefield. Tim O’Brien tried to hold on to his friends boot and pull him out of the muddy waters, but there was mud in his nose and eyes, the sounds of flares and explosions filled his head, and he couldn’t take it any longer so he let go. This man watched his friend sink into the battlefield, helpless. Tim feels guilty for letting his friend slip right through his hands and slowly sink beneath the mud. He knew that if the things going on around him weren’t there that he could’ve saved his friend, but he couldn’t. “In Vietnam, too, we had ways of making the dead seem not quite so dead, by acting, we pretended it was not the terrible thing it was, we kept the dead alive with stories” (O’Brien 225-226). Even though he felt guilt for letting his friend slip right through his hands and sink into the mud, he can still live on through stories. The memories that were kept and the stories told about Kiowa’s character and personality are what will keep his memory

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien uses the art of fabricating stories as a coping mechanism. Trying to distinguish the difference between fictional and factual stories is a challenge in this book, but literal truth cannot capture the real violence that the soldiers dealt with in Vietnam, only “story truth” can. He explains, “If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made victim of a very old and terrible lie.” (O’Brien 65). The novel illustrates that storytelling is a way to keep the dead alive, even if it may not be a true story.

Memories and stories swarming the mind and twisted by imagination are the only glimpse of humanity a man can hold on to while at war. Through stories, men at war can share their thinning humanity with one another. The deafening silence of war defeats the human spirit and moral compass, thus it is not only man against man but man against sanity. Tim O 'Brien 's “The Things They Carried” provides a narrative of soldiers in the Vietnam War holding on to the only parts of themselves through their imagination. O’Brien employs symbolic tokens, heavy characterization, and the grueling conflict of man to illustrate how soldiers create metaphorical stories to ease the burden of war.

When someone goes through a time of grief, it is only natural to find a way to deal with the hardships and until it eventually goes away, but people may come to realize that the loss can never be forgotten. This process of grieving and fighting through hard times to finally come to peace and accept reality is also reflected in literature such as “Hold Tight”. The short story ¨Hold Tight¨ by Amy Bloom shows that when people deal with grief, people may try to find ways to cope with the pain by letting out their anger on others or becoming self-destructive, even though it may not be possible to completely forget the woe.

The short story that will be discussed, evaluated, and analyzed in this paper is a very emotionally and morally challenging short story to read. Michael Meyer, author of the college text The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature, states that the author of How to Tell a True War Story, Tim O’Brien, “was drafted into the Vietnam War and received a Purple Heart” (472). His experiences from the Vietnam War have stayed with him, and he writes about them in this short story. The purpose of this literary analysis is to critically analyze this short story by explaining O’Brien’s writing techniques, by discussing his intended message and how it is displayed, by providing my own reaction,

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.

Memories are what make us who we are and storytelling is how we seek to share who we are with others. This has long been the tradition of mankind, passing on our experiences and lessons to others as a means to not only enlighten and endow our listeners with what we have learned about life, but also how those lessons have served to shaped who we are. When sharing our stories and memories, we are able to better resonate with our audience by connecting with them on an emotional level. Such is the manner in which the personal experiences of war are shared in the pieces The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara and The Things They Carried. Although McNamara and O’Brien’s experiences of war were vastly different, their personal recollections and the separate examinations of the manner in which they each experienced the war can serve to provide insight into the true nature of warfare. Both accounts prove that human memories are important in helping us to understand our own histories and that personal experiences often color the manner and method in which that history is told, whether our role is as a decision maker or the one being affected by the decisions of others. The depiction of the memory process for each piece will be examined in order to better understand each figure’s recollection of historical events in regards to their role, where McNamara served as one of the “planners” and O’Brien’s characters as the “participants.”

They try to build a new life, but memories from the war are still strongly obvious to them. Through the feeling of embarrassment inside the soldier, O’Brien has depicted the post-war effects of the

At some time in life, a person will experience the death of a relative or lose something that was very important to him or her. After that traumatic event, will that person confront his or her pain, or will that person bury it deep within them? Both ways are possible, however, only one is effective in the long term. According to Tim O'Brien, the most effective way to heal after a traumatic experience is to share stories. In Tim’s book, The things they carried, he used the motifs of loneliness, life, and the mood of nostalgia to illustrate the importance of sharing stories during a healing process.

“War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.” Tim O’Brien wrote in his novel The Things They Carried. There are many different ways to connect with a reader through pieces of writing. Tim O’Brien captured many readers through his detailed writing and telling of Vietnam War stories throughout the novel The Things They Carried. In the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, his writing lacked thorough description and feeling compared to The Things They Carried. Tim O’Brien connects with the reader through his writing

In Tim O’Brien’s, The Things They Carried, several stories depicted the emotional and psychological damages towards the American soldiers during the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War taunted several soldiers after the forced draft and long war time memories. O’Brien presents the book as both a war memoir and a personal autobiography retrospectively. His primary motive of reiterating and working through the flashback memories is to find some meaning towards the Vietnam War. Working and reworking through the memories illuminates the raw conditions the American soldiers shared together during the time period.

Any veteran who has ever been through combat, or has seen it firsthand, can attest to the fact that it is difficult to return to the normalcy of their everyday lives. The things they saw and heard on the battlefield tend to play over and over in their minds, often making it hard to function on a day to day basis. Kurt Vonnegut and Tim O’Brien are no exceptions to this post-war experience, and both use their writing to escape the overwhelming feelings that would have otherwise consumed them. Even though, Slaughterhouse Five and The Things They Carry are both coping mechanisms for the authors, they differ in the way in which the authors express their grief. Kurt Vonnegut uses his novel to create a world in which there is no free will, therefore

“No matter how tough the situation, you still have to hang on.” Lailah Gifty Akita. Grief, an obstacle that we must all overcome at one point in our lives. Grief is everywhere, you may not notice it but it is omnipresent. Victims of 9/11 were faced with tremendous amounts of grief, most were traumatized. An event that is unforgettable to many. In two of the works, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran and "Reign Over Me" by Mike Binder, there were many instances of grief which the individuals must overcome. You must learn to embrace grief or be stuck in a never-ending cycle of despair which was seen through the characters befriending others to overcome their grief, moral support that