Literary Elements In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

Written by author Tim O’Brien after his own experience in Vietnam, “The Things They Carried” is a short story that introduces the reader to the experiences of soldiers away at war. O’Brien uses potent metaphors with a third person narrator to shape each character. In doing so, the reader is able to sympathize with the internal and external struggles the men endure. These symbolic comparisons often give even the smallest details great literary weight, due to their dual meanings. The symbolism in “The Things They Carried” guides the reader through the complex development of characters by establishing their humanity during the inhumane circumstance of war, articulating what the men need for emotional and spiritual survival, and by revealing

For Jimmy Cross, he humped pictures of Martha, “a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey ” (318) and the letters she writes him. O’Brien highlights these items as special things that Lt. Jimmy Cross carries because they symbolize all he has left behind and hopes to someday return to. Additionally, the letters he receives from Martha are light in weight, only “ten ounce,” (315) but prove to be a heavy burden.

In the story Lieutenant Cross makes both of the changes after the death of Lavender. He changes his values by acknowledging that Martha was not in love with him and now he would not be in love with her and he also burnt the pictures and letters so he was not looking at them anymore. The guilt that they all felt altered how they acted. Some of the men made jokes about tense situations that were not funny because joking made them feel better. The situation grew lighter by laughter, even though the men knew nothing was funny about their situation, and this knowledge made them feel guilty about their insensitive acts because it violated their values. The way the men dealt with their guilt was by passing the blame or trying not to think about how wrong it was, even though they knew. These kinds of strange reactions to normally tense or tragic situations are a way to ease the fear of death.

Love is a powerful force, and Lieutenant Cross sometimes gets lost in his musings while thinking of Martha. O’Brien writes: “His mind wandered. He had difficulty keeping his attention on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha, carrying nothing.” Like any sane person in his situation, Lieutenant Cross wants to escape – to anywhere else but the war. The war brings terrible experiences – fear, death, hunger, and pain beyond imagination. The only way that Lieutenant Cross can endure these things is by escaping to an imaginary life with Martha. Although to her, he is little more than a friend, to Lieutenant Cross, Martha represents innocence, perfection, and a world free from war.

One critic states that “Though Cross is distracted and dreamy about a girl Martha, he also carries the responsibility for the lives of his men. (Plot Summary). For example, the author tells a story about what he carries. He tells about how his friend Ted happens to die. While he was on watch Ted was shot. All he could think about was how Ted dropped “like cement”(O’Brien 6). Also the only reason that “Ted Lavender was dead was because he loved Martha so much and could not stop thinking about her” (O’Brien 6). He was thinking about running on the beach with Martha, a girl from back home. In reality, this girl does not love him but she acts like she does or tends to lead him on because he is going away to war. As this is a play on him in the book maybe she is just trying to give him something to look forward to after the war. She send him a rock from the beach that he kept in his mouth and would leave it their tasting the sea salt. Also, he had a photo of her and would often wonder who took the photo of her when he would look at the one of the two she gave him. This is suspenseful because not only does one want to know if he ever talks to her again after what happens. In addition, after his tragic death he threw the rock and burn the pictures so that he would not ever be distracted again. Every time he thought of the death of his friend it made him feel more guilty.

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries with him a pebble given to him by Martha, a girl with whom he is in love and wishes to be back home with, along with letters and

In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, the main theme is that the young men of Alpha Company carry many physical and emotional burdens which linger on long after the war. As they walked through the jungles and swamps of South Vietnam, they carried weapons, equipment, personal items, and also carried the dead and wounded off the battlefield as well as the guilt for having survived. First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried the responsibility for the men under his command and guilt about the war they died, as well as a peculiar love for Martha that was probably not real. All of them carried fear, not only of the enemy but also the fear of appearing to be fearful, cowardly or dishonorable, which was very similar to George Orwell's fear of looking indecisive or weak in front of the natives in his short story "Shooting an Elephant". Like Orwell's characters his novel Burmese Days, they are often skeptical about the war and the entire colonial-imperial enterprise in Asia, finding the death of their comrades in the jungles and swamps to be futile and pointless. They will carry all the memories and images with them for the rest of their lives, just as Orwell did of his many experiences. Tom O'Brien also carried the burden of recalling and recording the war and its aftermath, although like his namesake in Orwell's 1984, by his own description of these characters and events may or may not be true. In general, the entire atmosphere of the novel could be described as Orwelllian, with a

The literal meaning of this passage is just how it sits. These men are thrown into war and are set with these ideals that it is not okay for them to express emotion towards what they are faced with on a daily basis. Although each and every one of those men were impacted by those gruesome sights and feelings, it was just an accepted way that things were. Real men were not supposed to be affected by their experiences. The greater significance it that it is everyone in life is changed somehow and influenced by each sight they see. One should not feel ashamed for letting an experience find it was truly into their heart and letting it take a role in their life. O’Brien is trying to highlight the plethora of things that each person carried beyond

War and its stories have been a prevalent theme in human life and has affected our lives for as long as humans have survived; tales of victory and failure told from older generations to the younger. The Things They Carried, a book by Tim O’Brien, brings a different side of war to light by describing his struggles before and after, as well as during the Vietnam War. In one of the first passages in chapter one, Tim O’Brien uses imagery and logos.

In The Things They Carried, O'Brien argues that people can be kept alive as long as their stories continue to be told. In the things they carried, O'Brien retells his experience in the Vietnam War through stories. “The thing is 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

O'Brien talked about the incredible cost of distraction that soldiers experienced during times of war. While Lieutenant Cross was thinking about Martha, a girl back in the states, Ted Lavender got shot. Thinking about Martha was Cross' way of taking his mind off the war. Martha's letters were his connection to home. Lieutenant Cross was trying to put himself in a situation other than the one he currently involved in. This happens in every war. The Lieutenant blamed himself because he felt that as the commanding officer, it was his responsibility to keep an eye on the men. When something like this happens,

Where, precisely, do we need to draw the line between reality and imagination, between truth and fabrication? When it comes to observing the ever-expanding world all around us, many people find it incredibly arduous not to let their beliefs of how the world should be influence their view of how the world actually is. For instance, much of American society after the conclusion of World War II was convinced that the spread of communism within Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia would ultimately lead to worldwide oppression and poverty, thus resulting in America’s eventual involvement in Vietnam. However, even though the United States’ administration sought to wholly “liberate” the Vietnamese from the “evil clutches” of communism during the conflict,

Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" is a short story told in the form of a catalogue. O'Brien's title provides both an accurate description of how the story is organized mainly by lists, with the narrative seeming an almost accidental intrusion but also as a sort of recurrent musical refrain in the text itself. The title phrase is repeated at semi-regular intervals in the text, and encourages the reader to understand the catalogue of items as adding up to something larger than the mere objects described. It is important to recognize, however, that the objects are in fact described with painstaking accuracy, and not impressionistically; as Kaplan notes of O'Brien's style in this story, "all of the things are depicted in a style that is almost scientific in its precision. We are told how much each subject weighs, either psychologically or physically, and in the case of artillery we are even told how many ounces each round weighed." (Kaplan 44-5) I hope to demonstrate through an examination of O'Brien's repetitions of the title phrase that the overall intent of the story is metaphorical. We are asked to understand the young soldiers in Vietnam through an analysis of the narrator's lists of "the things they carried".

Many have struggled with the “truth” behind of one of O’Brien’s most famous works, The Things They Carried, a compilation of tales of the Vietnam War that stand alone just as strongly as they weave together. O’Brien, a Vietnam veteran, writes of his personal experiences while simultaneously warning the reader of its fiction through introduction of “story truth” and “happening-truth”, leading the reader to question where he draws this line. These built up war stories come together to create an exceptional piece of work, allowing the individual to choose how perceive the different definitions of “truth”. O’Brien’s use of metafiction, the tool defined by the author drawing attention to the novels

Within the book “The Things They Carried”, the author uses numerous writing techniques to dramatize the situation, and get his point across. This type of writing is very suiting due to the emotional and intense content in the passage. To help convey this intensity, the author will do things such as addressing the reader directly, to creating a series of lists, or even just making the paragraphs extremely long.