How Does Tim O Brien Use Memory In The Things They Carried

Linda is the most important woman in the book. Even though she shows up in the end of the book for the one story, she was Tim O'Brien's first love. "I just loved her. She had poise and great dignity. Her eyes, I remember, were deep brown like her hair, and she was slender and very quiet and fragile-looking" (228). This shows how much he loves her, he can recall much detail after so long. The reason she is so important is, she is the one

Following orders, digging a foxhole, carrying a twenty-three pound M-60 assault weapon, or chasing Charlie does not erase the virtues previously programmed. Typically related to ethics and the distinction between right and wrong, morality exists throughout The Things They Carried in many forms. In the book, even the most deranged characters manage to be kind to one another. When dealing with death, characters experiment with ways to respect and remember the dead. In foreign Vietnam, the soldiers deal with cultural differences and work to find a middle ground. In the book, Tim O’Brien illustrates how morality manages to survive amidst the gore of the Vietnam War.

The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, transports the reader into the minds of veterans of the Vietnam conflict. The Vietnam War dramatically changed Tim O’Brien and his comrades, making their return home a turbulent and difficult transition. The study, titled, The War at Home: Effects of Vietnam-Era Military Service on Post-War Household Stability, uses the draft lottery as a “natural experiment” on the general male population. The purpose of the NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) study is to determine the psychological effects of the Vietnam War on its veterans. In order to do this, they tested four conditions, marital stability, residential stability, housing tenure, and extended family living. However, it

Many authors use storytelling as a vehicle to convey the immortality of past selves and those who have passed to not only in their piece of literature but in their life as an author. In Tim O’Brien’s work of fiction The Things They Carried, through his final chapter “The Lives of the Dead,” O 'Brien conveys that writing is a matter of survival since, the powers of storytelling can ensure the immortality of all those who were significant in his life. Through their immortality, O’Brien has the ability to save himself with a simple story. Through snippets of main plot event of other chapters, O’Brien speaks to the fact the dead have not actually left; they are gone physically, but not spiritually or emotionally. They live on in memories as Linda lives on in the memories of O’Brien and as many of his war buddies live on through his stories. He can revive them and bring them back to the world through his writings and through these emotions or events he experienced with them and with their deaths can make them immortal. Through the reminiscent stories of Linda and O’Brien’s war companions and himself, O’Brien conveys that storytelling allows people to reanimate others who have died and past selves to create an immortality of humans.

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.

Every one of us has experienced a strong emotional fear, and in that moment of stress, we learn more about who we are. The short story “The Things They Carried”, by Tim O’Brien, follows the lives of soldiers trying to survive the emotional and physical stresses of the Vietnam War. Throughout the story, O’Brien juxtaposes the physical weight of the supplies that the soldiers must carry with the immeasurable weight of their intense emotional experiences. The theme of “The Things They Carried” is the burden of fear, which O’Brien portrays through the counter-weight of objects the soldiers cling to for consolation and escape. Some men turn to objects that remind them of love, no matter how unlikely it is that they are loved back. Other men

In “Lives of the Dead”, O’Brien’s own innocence is preserved through the memory of Linda, a memory that remains untarnished by the inevitable corruption that results from life. O’Brien’s writings “save Linda’s life. Not her body--her life” (236). Storytelling and memories preserve the value of Linda’s existence while simultaneously allowing O’Brien to process death and destruction in a way that maintains a degree of optimism regarding his own life and future. Juxtaposing the images of body and life emphasizes his desire to save the idea of Linda while accepting the loss of her physical presence. O’Brien rejects the idea of death as absolute and final; instead he suggests that “once you are alive, you can never be dead” (244). Linda’s death solidifies her importance in O’Brien’s own development; she teaches him about life and real love as much as in death as in life. O’Brien’s paradoxical statement defines the lasting impact of Linda on him; her presence in his stories keeps her alive through memory; memories that even her death

During a person’s lifetime, rarely do they focus on the fact that at some point they’re going to die. In James Joyce’s short story “The Dead”, it transitions from a lively party hosted every year by the protagonist’s aunts Julia and Kate, to an in-depth epiphany on how death can affect the way a person lives and views their life. The protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, discovers something unexpected that makes him realize that people should live life to the fullest, which causes for a reinterpretation of himself as well as the people around him.

The fact that Tim remembers all these details about Elroy even though he has not seen him since those six days twenty years ago shows how important the man was to the course of his life.

Linda is the most important woman in the book. Even though she shows up in the end of the book for the one story, she was Tim O'Brien's first love. "I just loved her. She had poise and great dignity. Her eyes, I remember, were deep brown like her hair, and she was slender and very quiet and fragile-looking" (228). This shows how much he loves her, he can recall much detail after so long. The reason she is so important is, she is the one that gives Tim the ability to keep storytelling. Tim and Linda were in love, he even recalls the night they went on a date, when they were only in 5th grade. "That night, I remember, she wore a new red cap, which seemed very stylish and

Tim O’Brien is a great example of lost innocence. He gives full proof examples on how his innocence was lost, not only in the war, but before the war as well. O’Brien (character) speaks into depth about his loss of innocence in the last chapter of the novel, The Lives of the Dead, here he tells the story of how he experienced love and death at the same time. Linda was O’Brien 's (character) first love, when they were nine years old they fell in love, and the character O’Brien describes that although they were so young he truly felt that this was true love. Linda had cancer, and soon after their first date Linda passed away. She was the first loss of innocence for him, she was the first dead body he had ever seen, and that was extremely hard on him, as it would be for any nine year old, or anyone seeing someone they thought they were deeply in love with. Linda was the reason that O’Brien began writing in the first place. In order to make sense of his life O’Brien began to write to deal with the hard times. He believes that stories can help you deal with the issues in your life, reflecting on the good times, or fantasizing about what you want to actually occur. “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the

Drawing upon the ability of fiction to preserve life against death, O 'Brien says that, during wartime, that they were able to "[keep] the dead alive with stories" (239). To the living, stories were a way to keep the memory of the dead alive, but to the dead, it was the simple act of remembering that kept them alive: "That 's what a story does. The bodies are animated. You make the dead talk" (232). This theme of preservation is exemplified by story of Linda, in which O 'Brien uses the power of storytelling and memory to keep people alive: "Stories can save us. I 'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive...They 're all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world." (225).

On the fields and rice paddies of Vietnam, O’Brien constantly questions himself as to why he was a victor in the game of life and death. It is evident that there is some form of guilt that messes with him causing him to create these stories to extend the lives of those whose lives were cut short. Another form of ‘guilt’ by being one of the few survivors plays another role in the development of reviving and remembering his very first crush as a child, Linda. Linda had died when she was just nine years old to an incurable brain tumor. O’Brien’s use of his memory to reconstruct social settings and feelings allow him to repair and mend the wounds caused by her death. Experiencing the death of what O’Brien would consider a loved one, would have

The story about Timmy and Linda is so important because it represents the way storytelling and memory can alleviate the pain in any traumatic situation. "Lying in bed at night, I made up elaborate stories to bring Linda alive in my sleep."(O'Brien pg. 230). Timmy was the younger version of the new Tim, even when Linda first died he used stories to keep her alive. This was the first incident in his life that we know of where O'Brien references Storytelling to keep the dead alive. This can help us to understand why Tim O’Brien wrote this book, telling us all of his stories from war. Each of the stories he tells is a way to relieve his pain from war. In the worksheet over “Death”, I was asked what is meant by stories save people. What is meant

O’Brien deals with the death of his childhood love, Linda, by making up stories about her, because it helps him retain his few memories of her. He makes up stories in his sleep that bring Linda back to life. By dreaming about Linda, O’Brien is creating memories that allow him to hold on to her and prevent her from being forgotten.