Persuasive Essay: The Things They Carried

Are moral standards in the eye of the beholder? According to one author, “we’ve seriously lost our way”, going on to state, “we are like mean adrift at sea without a compass” (Hulme). In literature as in biology, the mantra of form fits function applies and heightens a reader’s appreciation of a writer’s choice and how they contribute to a work of literature. In Tim O’Brien’s collection of short stories, The Things They Carried, the narrative, the experience of reading and the alternating Vietnam and modern day settings not only shape the author’s world view, but reflect upon his own experiences in the 1960’s and 1970’s war. The short stories within this work, “On the Rainy River” and “Speaking of Courage”, set at the American-Canadian border and a Vietnamese field of excretions, respectively, establish the overwhelming ambiguity, constant flux and uncertainty that characterizes the experiences of O’Brien’s protagonist (himself) thus reinforcing the author’s message about the relativity of truth. What they did was morally wrong.

“Hey guys! This is the last communication you shall receive from me. I now walk out to live amongst the wild. Take care, it was great knowing you” (Qtd. In Krakauer 69). After graduating from Emory University, Christopher McCandless abandoned everything, gave his entire savings account to charity, and then hitchhiked to Alaska to live in the wild. In the novel, Into the Wild, Was McCandless justified in shunning society? McCandless was justified in shunning society because he simply wanted to find himself and be independent without any distractions from his friends or family.

The Vietnam War was a troubling time for Tim O’Brien. He battles with himself over a decision he makes, which makes him feel like a coward. He tells of a personal experience he has shared with no one not even his wife. His short story “On the Rainy River” is absolutely captivating. In this true story he uses a plethora of literary devices that leads the reader from beginning to end to visualize, feel, and sympathize with him as he tells his personal and emotional battle.

The Things They Carried is a novel that depicts the physical and mental things soldiers had to carry with them during and after Vietnam through the use of multiple short stories about different soldiers in the Vietnam War. Each of the short stories concentrated on a different aspect, but combined to form an overall life lesson about what these young men went through and what they carried with them in their life once the war started. A repeating

Norman Bower, a character in The Things They Carried, reflects on the war by stating, “They wanted good intentions and good deeds” (150). O’Brien, however, creates stories which reveal the fact that not all war stories are dictated by courage and valor. Speaking of Courage highlights this idea by telling the story of a man, Norman Bowker, who realized

The war can cause internal struggles for the soldiers and several of them become enveloped in frustration. The frustration continues to fester and grow, resulting in some gruesome and disgraceful results. After the death of Curt Lemon, Rat Kiley senselessly began shooting a water buffalo. His goal “wasn’t to kill; it was to hurt” (75). If Kiley had delivered one fatal blow to the water buffalo, it would have died without suffering. However, blinded by his anger, he ruthlessly fired a tirade of bullets at the buffalo. As Kiley continued to shoot away “chunks of meat” (75) of the buffalo, his sense of morality began to dissolve as well. Had he lost his best friend while in the United States, he would not have resorted to this senseless behavior. However, it seems as if Kiley is not fully aware of his actions. His emotions and his despair seem to be his excuse for the rampage, but in the end he never kills the buffalo. It would be thought that he would carry through with the assault until the very end, but he gives up and just breaks down. He still seems to have a sense of his morals in keeping the buffalo alive, but at the same time continued to destroy them as he thought leaving the buffalo with irrecoverable, fatal injuries was better than putting it out of its misery. O’Brien focuses on the injuries to the water

The Vietnam War generates the idea that time in violent environments can impact a person's emotional and physical health causing that person to lose sight of their morals and ethics. This is proven true in Tim O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried. In O’Brien’s novel the author delivers to the reader a variety of war stories from unique perspectives of many American soldiers. By this, the reader can observe that O'Brien's narrations of war stories reveals the difficulties of the war and the purposelessness of it.

In the first story, the reader is introduced to the band of soldiers of the Alpha Company. O’Brien begins the dialogue from an unknown third party narrator, to describe the things the men carry; things issued like compass, fatigues (clothing), and a M-16. However, the emotional burdens that the soldiers bear have a separate weight. “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing- these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight” (21). These burdens are only amplified by the soldiers’ young age and inexperience. Many men who fought in the Vietnam War were in their late teens and early twenties—fictional character O’Brien was 22. O’Brien recounts these soldiers as children, students and boyfriends who had no little to no perspective on how to rationalize killing, or how to come to terms with their comrades’ deaths. He speaks of his first encounter of death in the war, as the men shake hands with

Tim O 'Brien 's novel The Things They Carried is meant to display the effects of Vietnam on both American soldiers as well as the boys they once were. Vietnam is a society where human decency is left behind, and death is embraced as either a joke or an escape--where the horrors of reality are turned comical and exaggerated in order to keep going. Tim O 'Brien shows how Vietnam turns him from a boy unknowing of death, to a young man unwilling to face it, to a soldier laughing in the face of it, to a veteran unwilling to leave it behind, and finally, to an author left to make sense of it all.

The Dead Young Vietnamese Soldier: O’Brien’s killing of the young man takes a profound toll on him in Vietnam. At first, the reader believes that the young man is no more than a symbol of O’Brien’s guilt. However, when O’Brien imagines the young man’s life and how it so closely parallels his own, the reader understands that the he represents what O’Brien’s eventual fate could be. The idea of death is an ever-present fear amongst those in Vietnam, and has plagued O’Brien since he received his draft card. When he kills the young man, O’Brien disregards what is acceptable

In the twenty years following the Vietnam War, Tim O’Brien failed to share any stories from his experiences in Vietnam. Finally he decided to write a book that he titled, The Things They Carried, in 1990 where he details all of the struggles he experienced after being drafted into the Vietnam War. In chapter twelve, “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien details Tim’s uncertainty after killing his first Viet Cong soldier. As the soldier lay on the ground physically destroyed by a grenade that once resided in Tim’s hand, Tim could not look away from him. He felt that this soldier could have been his friend if it was not for the war, for which the reasons were ambiguous. As he knelt beside the body, he mentally eulogized the man for his life accomplishments. Even though Tim had never met this man prior to that moment, he was able to take his own life experiences and project them into the life of the deceased. Tim says of the man, “He imagined covering his head and lying in a deep hole and closing his eyes and not moving until the war was over. He had no stomach for violence. He loved mathematics” (“Killed” 801) which paralleled Tim’s feelings after being drafted into the war. O’Brien did not understand the political reasons that the United States had entered the Vietnam War, and he did not want to come home in a body bag from a war that he did not believe in. In chapter four, “On the Rainy River,” of his novel he shares this ambiguity by writing, “certain blood was being shed for

Source: CDC, National Center for Health Statistics, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Health, United States, 2002. Flegal et. al. JAMA. 2002;288:1723-7. NIH, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, Clinical Guidelines on the Identification, Evaluation and Treatment of Overweight and Obesity in Adults, 1998.

“Your assignment is to write a persuasive essay and present it to the class in a week. You will be graded based on how convincing it is. Today we will be choosing topics,” announced Mr. Bowerbank, my 7th grade English teacher and ruler of classroom 110. My class simultaneously groaned at the prospect of work. I simply lifted my head with intrigue as it was already May and about time we had our first essay. He then proceeded to give examples of topics we could choose and gave us some time to think before we had to tell him our topic. My classmates were already rushing to tell the teacher their idea lest someone else steal it. That meant the usual abortion, death penalty, or drug use topics were out. I really couldn't think of anything and the teacher was slowly making his way through the remaining students like an executioner beheading criminals in a line. I have always thought that he would make a marvelous supervillain if he had a curly mustache, a tophat, and a cape. Eventually my name was called. I slowly dragged myself over to his desk. Even sitting down, he still seemed to tower over me. “What is your topic Cindy?” As usual in such desperate times, my mind turned to food. “Waffles are better than pancakes.” I figured that a waffle was just a differently shaped pancake with a nicer texture. “Hmm. Excellent topic. I look forward to your essay!” I survived to live yet another day.

As a draft in the Vietnam War, O’Brien talks of a war he “hated”. He defines this event in a dreadful and confusing light. Conveying his personal dissatisfaction of the combat by stating the Five W’s, who, what where, when, why, which question the rationality and certainty, or lack thereof, of the “civil” war. Many of his own convictions were displayed by continuous questioning of events in

Having escaped rule from a tyrannical British government, the United States was founded on ideals of freedom and equality for all people. These fantasies of universal egalitarianism turned out to be merely that: fantasies. American history is full of stories of the oppressed struggling to get the rights they deserve and of the controversy over these issues that consequently ensues. “The Hypocrisy of American Slavery” by Frederick Douglass and “We Shall Overcome” by Lyndon B. Johnson are two speeches made confronting two of these issues. Douglass’s speech, delivered in 1852, condemns the institution of slavery and maintains that slaves are men and are therefore entitled to freedom. Johnson’s speech, on the other hand, was written in 1965 and discussed the civil rights movement. In it, he implored local governments to allow all American citizens, regardless of race, to vote. Despite the significant gap in time between these two addresses, both speakers use similar persuasive techniques, including ethos, pathos, and parallelism, to convince their audience that change needs to be implemented in America.