The Importance of Friendship in The Things They Carried
The Things They Carried is a collection of stories about the Vietnam War that the author, Tim O’Brien, uses to convey his experiences and feelings about the war. The book is filled with stories about the men of Alpha Company and their lives in Vietnam and afterwards back in the United States. O’Brien captures the reader with graphic descriptions of the war that make one feel as if they were in Vietnam. The characters are unique and the reader feels sadness and compassion for them by the end of the novel. To O’Brien the novel is not only a compilation of stories, but also a release of the fears, sadness, and anger that he has felt because of the Vietnam War.
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These men looked to each other for emotional support and reassurance since none was coming from the homefront. The men of Alpha Company trusted each other with their lives. Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk are a good example of this trust, “In late August they made a pact that if one of them should ever get totally fucked up – a wheelchair wound – the other guy would automatically find a way to end it” (O’Brien, 71). This pact helps these two in that they know that if it came down to living their entire life in a wheel chair that the other would end it there in Vietnam. The men trusted each other to make no mistakes because one mistake could cause someone to lose their life.
He pictured Kiowa’s face. They’d been close buddies, the tightest, and he remembered how last night they had huddled together under their ponchos, the rain cold and steady, the water rising to their knees, but how Kiowa had just laughed it off and said they should concentrate on better things. And so for a long while they’d talked about their families and hometowns. At one point, the boy remembered, he’d been showing Kiowa a picture of his girlfriend. He remembered switching on his flashlight. A stupid thing to do, but he did it anyway, and he remembered Kiowa leaning in for a look at the picture – “Hey, she’s cute,” he’d said – and then the field exploded all around them.
Like murder, the boy thought. The flashlight made it happen. Dumb and dangerous. And as a
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried places readers in the shoes of soldiers such as Jimmy Cross, Kiowa or Rat Kiley in order to offer readers a better understanding of what American soldiers faced during the Vietnam War. By recreating the atmosphere of the Vietnam War time period accurately, O’brien had the freedom of adding realistic, but truly fictional elements to make his story more life-like. While none of the soldiers in this story are real individuals, his use of character’s point of view and their stream of consciousness helps to present their emotions and reactions in a very accurate way. Tim O'Brien employs the literary elements of perspective and syntactical expression to bring readers into a very realistic, yet fictional parallel
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
In the book the things they carried the author Tim O'brien uses friendship as a main theme throughout the book.By using several stories and events that happened to his platoon The Ahlpa Company in the Vietnam war, Tim O'brien is showing us the importance of friends in war.
The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien is a story of a group of soldiers going through Vietnam during the war. It describes the mental burdens outweigh the physical agony that soldiers in war must carry. Depends on each soldier, they carry both tangible and intangible items. O’Brien argues that uncertainty, responsibility, and fear that soldiers experience much outweigh the physical torture that they had to endure to keep them alive, burdens eased only slightly after the hope of returning home.
The Things They Carried is a work of historical fiction written by Vietnam war veteran, Tim O’Brien. This novella is a collection of linked short stories about American soldiers serving in the Vietnam war. The novella contains a numerous amount of deep,complex characters who help characterize each other. In the The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien characterizes the soldiers through the round female characters
The novel, The Things They Carried is a story of one man’s accounts resulting to his tour of duty in Vietnam. Many of the men that are discussed in the book continued to be effected by the war, long after they returned home. Men were left emotionally scared, even if they managed to get out of the war physically unharmed. The
In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien the author of this novel but also an important character who is a soldier in the Vietnamese War. Along with O’Brien are other soldiers that were very unprepared and filled with varied emotions like fear, sadness, anger and confusion while fighting the war. O’Brien as well as other soldiers carry things that they value during the war. They carry physical things that important to them and also rifles and things to help them survive. Also, mentally they carry more things like memories, fears, dreams, and hopes for the future. O’Brien understands and depicts the things the war takes from the soldiers and also himself. In this except Tim O’Brien uses imagery, epiphany and inner self conflict to develop his
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is a fictional work based on O'Brien's personal experiences in the Vietnam War. Although the book is based on true and intimate experiences, he makes it known to the readers that he is an unreliable narrator because at times he will exaggerate or even make up stories just to get a certain message across. Moreover, in this book he speaks about his experience being drafted, in addition to his life before, during, and after the war. He also spoke about how the war affected him as a person. Not only does he just include his point of view throughout the book, he also includes other perspectives such as those of the soldiers that were with him during the time.
The Vietnam War. A war that many Americans believed unfair and unnecessary. “Why am I being sent off to fight in a war I don’t know anything about? Will I ever return again?” Many draftees asked themselves these questions hoping to find comfort in the answers. But there was little to no hope, and they knew it. They were being drafted and they could do absolutely nothing about it, only hope that at the end they would be returning to the enlightened faces of their loved ones, something that not many Vietnam soldiers expected to ever see again. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, portrays his experience in the war along with his fellow squad members, in their fight for survival against the Vietcong. In The Things They Carried, each
The Vietnam War is an important part that played a crucial role to make history in the United States of America. This event took the longest military conflict that started from 1959 to 1975. There were many soldiers that lost their lives, but there were other soldiers that survived to share what they experience and what they had faced. The novel “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’ Brien, the author himself is an American writer and a survived soldier from the Vietnam War. This novel portrayed the past and present events that were experienced in detail about the war, as well as the experienced that his fellow soldiers that had faced in the war.
Charlie Meyer 6/20/18 Freshman English (CP) Final Mrs. Moffat The Things They Carried - War Story Why is it so hard to tell a true war story? The Things They Carried is a novel containing various stories from the Vietnam War. These stories are often about the challenges of the war, however the chapter¨How To Tell A True War Story¨ repeatedly states the challenges of telling a truthful and accurate war story. Written by Tim O'Brien, in The Things They Carried, questioning, morals, and qualities reveal the difficulties in telling a true war story.
In the novel, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien, a Vietnam war veteran himself, tells stories through a soldier’s eyes to describe the Vietnam war and to prove how war changes people. O’Brien’s stories in this novel are directly inspired by his real-life experiences in the Vietnam war. These stories go step by step telling the story of becoming and being a soldier: describing how a soldier feels when they get their draft letter, how it affects a soldier when they kill someone or a fellow soldier is killed, and how
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
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is a portrait for war stories. Sandy Kempner's letter paints a clear picture. His role in Vietnam proves the toll it takes on mind, body, and spirit. The author uses the rhetorical devices of imagery, irony, and anaphora to illustrate his environment.
The young teenager stumbled through the forest wearing ragged clothes and jeans smeared with dry mud and dirt. The wind rushing against his cheeks made the tears dry out and sting his face. His thongs flipping up and down as he ran. He spotted a dry creek just at the tip of his eye and headed towards it. He lay down exhausted panting and catching his breath, sobbing.