Literary Elements In The Things They Carried, By Tim O Brien

To be engaged in war is to be engaged in an armed conflict. Death is an all too ordinary product of war. It is an unsolicited reward for many soldiers that are fighting for their country’s own fictitious freedom. For some of these men, the battlefield is a glimpse into hell, and for others, it is a means to heaven. Many people worry about what happens during war and what will become of their loved ones while they’re fighting, but few realize what happens to those soldiers once they come home. The short stories "Soldier's Home” by Ernest Hemingway and "Speaking of Courage” by Tim O'Brien explore the thematic after effects of war and how it impacts a young person's life. Young people who

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

With the use of repetition, O’Brien accomplishes to show the connection between the Vietnam soldiers and the

Upon returning home the soldiers meet a field of new troubles that come with acclimation to society after fighting. Many soldiers come home with skills that are not applicable to their lives and generally a much deeper understanding of what they believe the world consists of. This leads to much disillusion with the world they come back to. In both Ernest Hemingway and Tim O’Brien’s stories, soldiers meet with disillusionment and disconnect from society. The soldiers react in different ways to this feeling; the authors use diction, sentence structure, and figurative language to demonstrate their troubles with acclimation.

Through The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien moves beyond the horror of fighting in the Vietnam War to examine with sensitivity and insight the nature of courage and fear. Included, is a collection of interrelated stories. A few of the stories are brutal, while others are flawed, blurring the distinction between fact and fiction. All the stories, however, deal with one platoon. Some are about the wartime experiences of soldiers, and others are about a 43-year-old writer reminiscing about his platoon’s experiences. In the beginning chapter, O’Brien rambles about the items the soldiers carry into battle, ranging from can openers, pocketknives, and mosquito repellent o

The text, ‘The Things They Carried', is an excellent example which reveals how individuals are changed for the worse through their first hand experience of war. Following the lives of the men both during and after the war in a series of short stories, the impact of the war is accurately portrayed, and provides a rare insight into the guilt stricken minds of soldiers. ‘The Things They Carried' shows the impact of the war in its many forms: the suicide of an ex-soldier upon his return home; the lessening sanity of a medic as the constant death surrounds him; the trauma and guilt of all the soldiers after seeing their friends die, and feeling as if they could have saved them; and the deaths of the soldiers, the most negative impact a war

Sometimes, however, no matter how much a soldier tried to find escapes for himself, obstacles would come in their way and force men to find other means of coping with reality. Many times this extra stress would come after a soldier killed someone, and felt overwhelming guilt for taking another human life. In The Things they Carried, there are not thousands of examples of this form of death, but we are made aware of one specific story. O 'Brien tells us about the man he killed, and the difficulty in releasing his guilt in this matter. He more than once describes the man in great detail, almost attempting to clear the event out of his mind even though he claims he "did not look on [his] work as therapy" (139, 179). This is a time when the best coping mechanism the men have is time and open ears. As they drag Tim away from the scene after giving him a few minutes to accept and process the death, Kiowa urges to "talk" (144). This is the only way he can

In Tim O'Brien's narrative, The Things They Carried, characters are shown going through excruciatingly difficult war struggles. There are many intriguing themes that O’Brien is sharing in the text, but the most striking is the differences between the way each person handles war. People in the story cope by imagining things for motivation and pleasure. Imagination can help soldiers, but also does not help in war when the coping distracts one from important situations. The most common coping mechanism in the war stories has to do with women because they were used as security blankets during war. Soldiers use women, imagined and real, to offer an escape from war, but due to their inability to understand the war, the women cannot help them cope.

When many think of a great, memorable story, they will probably remember an inspirational or coming of age novel, or Bildungsroman. In many ways, The Things They Carried is an exemplary Bildungsroman as it carries the reader through the lives and problems of every soldier within its pages. Each man is witnessed as he goes through his own maturation and personal times of struggle and hardships. Some are focused on more than others, but each man has a story to tell, each a moral to teach. Throughout The Things They Carried, both Tim O?Brien and Mark Fossie experience a significant amount of personal maturation by gaining new knowledge about themselves, the Vietnam War, and the world around them.

In the book “the things they carried” Storytelling is a major theme. characters in this book are greatly affected by storytelling because it’s their only way of coping with the war. Or in Bob “Rat” Kylie’s case; to brag about his dead friend to his friend’s sister. This seemed to be the only way he could cope with his death. Friend’s It also affected their moods in the that; they went from killing without mercy or care to cry over their fellow soldier’s death. This book could teach us a lot about the war, But sadly, not all of it. History textbooks talk about how awful the war was, but we cannot feel those emotions unless we experience it for ourselves. However, this doesn't mean we can’t feel emotions when others are telling their story. When

For example, in the chapter “Spin,” O’Brien explains how “it’s all relative. You’re pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a paddy, getting your ass delivered to kingdom come, but then for a few seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few puffy white clouds, and the immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs--the whole world gets rearranged--and even though you’re pinned down by a war you never felt more at peace” (O’Brien 34). In short, there are indeed moments of extreme violence in war, but these are sometimes alternated with moments of peace and tranquility that often occur simultaneously. This fact about the experience of war may somewhat surprise readers due to it straying away from preconceived notions of the violence of war. In particular, the feeling of peace during an intense battle may seem illogical and nonsensical, but in war, nothing needs to make sense; it is all about gut emotions, which are inherently fickle. In addition, O’Brien writes about how boring the war is: “the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders...you’d feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet,

During battle and wartime, in the experience stage, all of the frivolous emotions and concerns are melted away as this newly realized proximity to death brings a new appreciation for life and the truly important things. The things that truly matter to a man may vary and some of them, such as love, fear, comfort, and compassion, are intangible. And yet it is these intangible things and not direct orders from a commander that drive a man onward during war. Unfortunately, war not only reveals the innermost truths of a man’s character, it also destroys his capacity for leading a normal life upon his return home. Once a man has confronted his personal demons and come to some sort of understanding regarding his place in the universe and the inevitability of death, he has an extremely difficult time acclimating himself to civilian life once the war ends. Of all the novels read in War Literature, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and two Tim O’Brien novels: Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried, best illustrate the inability of a soldier to deal with his original settings after returning from war. By studying the actions of Marlow, Paul Berlin, and Tim O’Brien (both the author and the character) after they leave the war, it is clear that they each use their own unique war experiences to deal with

According to Freud, ‘the mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water’ . Through the psychological lens that looks at the submerged part of the ‘iceberg’, one understands that repressed fear and trauma never cease to exist in the war participants’ lives. The novels present to readers not only the gruesomeness in Vietnam’s combat zones, but also the internal battle that the soldiers and veterans keep fighting days, months and years after the immediate traumatic experience. To them, the war indeed never ends.

Soldiers are trained in military bases, where they learn the craft of warfare before being sent to combat. They are prepared physically and mentally, but nothing compares to the real situations in battle. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien says “ It was my fourth day [...] I felt a moist sickness rise up in my throat. I sat down beside the pigpen, closed my eyes, put my head between knees,” (O’Brien, 214). This quote demonstrates how O’Brien is unable to deal with death, even though he was prepared to confront it. O’Brien mental state starts to deteriorate and he seems to have an emotional breakdown. For example, “ The young soldier stood off by himself at the center of the field [...] the boy’s face was impossible to make out. The filth seemed to erase identities,” (O’Brien, 156). In this moment,

The catastrophic events that we refer to as World War I were devastating to the entire world. Thousands of soldiers were killed, and acres of land were destroyed because of the death, blood and debris which were scattered throughout the land. War was brutal for the people and families living at home who were trying to conserve resources such as scraps of metal, food, and bandages for the soldiers’ at war. However, the effect the war had on the soldiers fighting day in and day out was enormous. Constantly, soldiers were falling over dead, while others were being injured right and left. In addition to the massive amount of physical harm that was caused for the soldiers, many of them suffered emotional harm. After living through a war, these soldiers were trying to cope with the trauma of war, and all they had just witnessed. Some of the only ways these soldiers would survive during the course of the war was from the camaraderie they shared with fellow soldiers. The book All Quiet on the Western Front explores what daily war is like for soldiers, the graphic scenes of war, and the compartmentalization which was crucial for the continual fighting the soldiers endured. The author of All Quiet on the Western Front Erich Maria Remarque is able to portray daily life so well by using the characters Paul, Kat, Kropp and their fellow comrades. The reader sees Paul and Kat fighting together and the sorrows they experience together. In his article Stars and Stripes, Geoff Ziezulewicz