O Brien's Pattern Of Structure

Junior Kyle O’Brien is one of the star players on the Malden High School Boys Cross Country team. O’Brien started participating in Cross Country during his freshman year and began running as a junior varsity runner, but also ran a two-mile race as varsity.

In the chapter titled “The Man I Killed”, O’Brien shares the story of the time he killed another man in Vietnam. During the chapter, O’Brien seems to be going off on multiple tangents talking about random things like how, “He wore a black shirt, black pajama pants, a gray ammunition belt, a gold ring on the third finger of his right hand.” (O’Brien 118) O’Brien also keeps repeating phrases such as, “His jaw was in his throat” and “One eye was shut and the other was a star-shaped hole”. (O’Brien 118-124) In “Speaking of Courage” O’Brien tells a story of how when Norman Bowker was discharged, he returned to his hometown finding he could not acclimate to the ‘normal’ world.

In this story used a lot of repetition. He repeats the description this man as the guy lay dead on the ground. He also creates a life for this guy. what he thinks his life was and going to be. He was humanizing him unlike others on his platoon. This repetition shows how his mind was coping with him taking this guy’s life. This is one common symptom of PTSD; when traumatic events replay in his mind. During this moment he had a internal conflict. During this he was creating a life for this guy. He doesn't know this guy. so why did he do this? Did he do this to cope with taking his life? Wouldn't that make him feel more worse about killing him? This is one of the negative ways of coping with something. This would make it harder for him to survive during the war, but this also allowed him to keep his humanity. By humanizing him he made himself vulnerable to harm from anyone in the area. This is bad for Tim O’brien survival in the

O'Brien presents the details of his story in chronological order. In the lengthy paragraphs, he incorporates many specific details such as his emotions, his surroundings, and his current situations. In his lengthy paragraphs, he also included short, fragmented sentences to lure in his audience to keep on reading. “Silly and hopeless.” (55) This three word sentence is not a complete thought and conveys a sense of fragmentation. This represents his confusion and loss of unity during this time period and at war. He uses flashbacks to better narrate and add a background to his story. The structure presents how much time has passed in between events. Tim O’Brien uses narration and description modes to further emphasize the struggles of going to war. “I spent the summer of 1968 working in an Armour meatpacking plant...it was like standing for eight hours a day under a lukewarm blood shower.” (41) This narration foreshadows his shame and embarrassment in the future by using an extended metaphor about war. He alludes to the audience that essentially, war is like a blood shower. The narrative mode included O’Brien referring to himself in the first-person point of view, having it take place in the past to help to reader understand the present, using dialogue between people, action and descriptions of events and

At the same time, O’Brien struggles with destructiveness of the conflicting images of violence and peace in death through the juxtaposition of the imagery of the dead man. While “his one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole.” The dead man has one shut eye that resembles a peaceful sleep, while the other side is obliterated by the grenade into a star-shaped hole. The image of the star-shaped hole in the dead soldier’s eye represents the hopes that he once had when he was alive: “He hoped the Americans would go away. Soon, he hoped. He kept hoping and hoping, always” (119). Furthermore, “his right cheek was smooth and hairless,” an image of untouched innocence that contrasts with his left cheek, which was “peeled back in three ragged strips,” destroyed by the violence O’Brien inflicts upon it. The juxtaposition of the butterfly that settles on his chin and the fatal wound on his neck, “open to the spinal cord…blood…thick and shiny” illustrate the complexity and ambiguity of the unnaturalness of war, depicted by the image of the dead man’s wrung neck, contrasted with the ironic peace and naturalism of death in the image of the fragile butterfly. These select images are also those that O’Brien chooses to fixate upon and develop throughout the chapter as he struggles to comprehend the moral implications of his actions. The innocence of the “slim, dead, almost dainty young man” is further reinforced when O’Brien describes his wrists as “wrists of a

Often in the years following a war the notion of warfare is warped by common conceptions or cliches so that it no longer resembles the realities that the soldiers experienced. However, Tim O’Brien uses his own personal experiences from Vietnam to create stories which exhibit the real situations that these soldiers faced. The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, demonstrates this unfiltered reality through multiple literary elements and the creation of fictional stories in order to portray the war accurately. Courage and valor are often associated with the idea of war and are often expected to be traits that all soldiers live by.

O’Brien reveals the purpose of his writing during a radio interview, “The goal, I suppose, any fiction has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human” (Conan 5). O’Brien writes so his readers are able to feel something in regards to his truths. Admittedly, his writing is not always accurate to his war experience but he wants the reader to feel sympathy towards him for what he has seen and gone through. O’Brien still holds a resentment for those who kept him in Vietnam (“Vietnam”) and he wants someone to understand his frustrations and everything he had to undergo just because someone decided that he had to; he stretches the truth in his novel so the reader can justify his emotions, which is difficult to ask for, resulting in an endorsement that is able to lessen Vietnam’s impact on him (Rodriguez 511). Furthermore, he uses language to evoke strong, palpable reactions from his audience.

His use of words such as “empty,” “wounded,” and “weak” showed how these soldiers were suffering due to the strain the war had on their bodies. Those words convey how painful the war was on the soldier’s muscles and bones, leaving them unhealthy and begging for a break. Thus, O’Brien was sympathetic towards the soldiers because they had to constantly endure pain with “no volition, no will.” This filled O’Brien was rage towards the U.S. for forcing these soldiers to undergo conditions that “st[u]nk with fungus and decay” because it showed how unremorseful they were for forcing men to stay and serve. If it was the other way around, the government could not survive in those conditions and would demand for more aid or protest their involvement.

In the story titled “The Man I Killed” O’Brien reflects on the events leading to and following his killing of a Vietnamese soldier via a grenade. He goes on to tell the reactions of his platoon mates as well as his own. The explosion of the grenade left the Vietnamese soldier’s face burned and unrecognizable. This symbolizes the life of so many of the thousands of dead Vietnamese soldiers that too were killed and consequently buried. These dead soldiers went unidentified and failed to bring their respective families closure. O’Brien struggles to cope with

Though the men reacted in violent ways in different situations, O’Brian’s violent act was something that stayed with him for the rest of his life and completely changed who he was as a person. “The Man I Killed” describes in detail the man and his life Tim O’Brien killed on a path in the jungle, even though he obviously did not know the man’s personal background, but mimicked it after his own. This description shows O’Brien’s life came to an end at his first act of violence, mirrored in the loss of the man’s life. After O’Brien’s incident on the pathway, he became cold and exemplified this new disposition after Jorgenson almost allowed O’Brien to die from a bullet wound, and in turn O’Brien needed pay back by scaring him in the middle of the night. The war may have physically killed many, but in this sense it damaged every soldier mentally.

This mindset shows how the soldiers are disconnected from their emotions, and not truly in the right state of mind. Additionally, in the same story, O’Brien uses the motif of carrying things. When the narrator states the things the soldiers carry, they mention how the soldiers carry their greatest fear, “the fear of blushing”. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to”(20). In this quote, the narrator explicitly states that the soldiers secretly carried a fear greater than dying, or even killing; blushing, or more specifically, the idea of expressing emotion.

Tim O’Brien faced a lot of different traumatizing situations during his one year in the Vietnam War, he was in ambushes, and had sleepless nights from all of the gun fire heard everywhere, grenades exploding, and staying on alert at all times for the sake of his life. Tim O’Brien talks about an ambush that Mad Mark tells him and everybody in a squad that

. . . Like I was losing myself, everything spilling out” (O’Brien 202). Provided with only laconic, expository definitions, an audience cannot truly feel the pains of war. O’Brien utilizes descriptions which evoke all the senses and submerge the audience in the unique and powerful sensations of war. Witnessing war’s pains through the familiar tactile crunch of an ornament or the splash of liquid spilling, the audience can immediately understand the inconceivable pressure placed on the soldier’s injured body. O’Brien continues, “All I could do was scream. . . . I tightened up and squeezed. . . . then I slipped under for a while” (203). His abrupt syntax and terse diction conveys a quickness to these events. Not bothering with extraneous adornment, his raw images transport the audience to the urgency of the moment and the severity of the pain. Now supplied with an eyewitness’s perspective of war’s injuries, the audience can begin to recognize the significance of the suffering. O’Brien tells his audience, “Tinny sounds get heightened and distorted. . . . There was rifle fire somewhere off to my right, and people yelling, except none of it seemed real anymore. I smelled myself dying” (203). In the same frame, O’Brien paints the rumbling chaos of the big war juxtaposed with the slow death of the small individual. His description emphasizes the purposeless discord and confusion of war and seeks to condemn its disorder. He argues that war’s lack of

The first story O’Brien decides to tell us is the story of Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. Cross represents a young and inexperienced soldier who went to war for all of the wrong reasons. He deals with the savagery of the Vietnam War through letters and pictures sent from the woman he loves back home, Martha. Cross carries physical objects, pictures, letters, as well as memories from his time spent back home with Martha before signing up for war. At one point in the story after describing a date between him and Martha, he mentions how “he should’ve carried her up the stairs to her room and tied her to the bed and touched that left knee all night long.” (5) His thoughts of Martha are enough to help distract him from the brutal realities taking place in the war. However, his distraction becomes too much, and it ends up resulting in the death of one of his fellow squad members, Ted Lavender. He carries regret for the death of Lavender, and years later confesses his guilt to O’Brien, and that he has never forgiven himself for his death. Despite his long-lived regret, Cross finds comfort in his thoughts of Martha, and hopes one day she will return his love.

Tim O’Brien tells the story of him and his platoon in Vietnam as well as a little about what each had experienced before and after the war. He tells each story in different way to elaborate on different things that happened around the same time. This complicated method emphasizes how he and each of his platoon member felt together while in Nam.It may jump from tale to tale in the stroy, but it has a clear message. In the story The Things They Carried O’Brien explains in different ways about being away from home can cause dramatic changes to someone in an alienating or a beneficial way.