The Role of Women in "The Things They Carried" Essay

Mary Anne adjusted to the life in Vietnam, as did the soldiers that were there, and as time progressed she began to enjoy or get a thrill out of being in Vietnam. "I mean when we first got here-all of us- we were real young and innocent, full of romantic bullshit, but we learned pretty damn quick. And so did Mary Anne,"(97). The learning curve in war is quickened by the fact that it is a matter of life or death when you are working in a war, and it did not matter who you were the you quickly learned how to operate in a battle field. Mary Anne did not fit in a first and did not know or understand her role in the war, and just like the fresh soldiers coming from America did know or understand their role in the war. As the soldiers, as well as Mary Anne, begin to realize the realities of the war they move their focus away from their homes in America and begin to focus on the work that needed to be accomplished in Vietnam. The physical changes that occur to Mary Anne as she begins to be assimilated into the Vietnam War are like night and day. She came as your typical American girl, but then becomes a fighting soldier looking and anticipating ugly war

Jimmy Cross shows his emotions towards Martha right at the beginning of the novel by sharing to us the following:

Martha is the first women we meet in the book. She is pretty much the typical stay at home war girl. She writes letters to Lt. Jimmy Cross, they met at a college in New Jersey but nothing sparked between them besides a friendship. There isn't any hope of them ever being together but Jimmy Cross still thinks about her constantly everyday. In one particular letter she sends him a good-luck-pebble. "Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline and carried it in her breast pocket for several days" (8). Jimmy Cross reads the letter spends hours wondering who she was at the beach with, if she was with a man, if they were a couple. When the women sent letters home, it really helped keep the morale of the soldier's. Although Martha continues to kind of mislead Jimmy when she signs the letters "love." "Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing. He lay with his mouth open" (12).

In “The Things They Carried,” by Tim O’Brien the theme of “carrying” both physical and emotional objects by the main characters can be found in the novel. While these men carry the same standard physical army gear, they differentiate with personal tangible and intangible items. From Lieutenant Cross’s responsibility of his men, to Henry Dobbin’s girlfriend’s pantyhose for its magic, each man faced the war with these things attached.

Throughout The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien it is difficult to separate what is fictitious, and what is true. During the entire work there are two different “truths”, which are “story truth” and “happening truth”. “Happening truth” is the actual events that happen, and is the foundation or time line on which the story is built on. “Story truth” is the molding or re-shaping of the “happening truth” that allows the story to be believable and enjoyable. It is not easy to distinguish “happening truth” from “story truth”, and at times during the novel O’brien reveals which is which. On the other hand, when the reader is blind to

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.

I feel as if she is just using jimmy as a shield to hide under and she probably does have feelings for jimmy but she is just scared to tell him how she really feels about him. I also feel as if she has a boyfriend and she is not telling anyone because she is a person that liked to hide secrets. On page 27 and 28, They’d run into each other, he said, at a college reunion in 1979. Nothing had changed . He stilled loved her. For eight or nine hours, he said, they spend most of their time together…. At breakfast the next morning she told him she was sorry. She explained that there was nothing she could do about it, and he said he understood, and then she laughed and gave him the picture and told him not to burn the picture and told him not to burn this one up. Jimmy shook his head. “It doesn’t matter”, he finally said, I love her. This quotes shows that even though jimmy and Martha ran into each other they were talking and jimmy finally knowing that martha doesn’t love him the way that he thought she loved him that way. On page 28, “ Jimmy thought it over and then gave me a smile. This quote shows that even though he found out that martha doesn’t feel the sameway that he feels about her is that he is going to

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

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.

Jimmy's transformation begins when he decides to burn the pictures and letters of his girlfriend, Martha. To be a leader in war was meaningless to Jimmy Cross compared to the love he had for Martha. Cross' subsequent burning of Martha's letters suggests that he's determined to put such romantic ideas behind him. He repeatedly convinces himself that there will be no more fantasies about Martha. The burning of Martha’s things is symbolically used by O’Brien to signify a turning point in Cross’ development. Cross realizes that Martha's feelings for him were not those of love, for she is an English major, a girl who lives in the world of words. Cross was rationalizing his un-requiting love for Martha to create a “home world” inside his mind so that he could mentally escape from the war when he needed to.

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

One of the biggest problems that Jimmy struggled with, was focusing, his mind was constantly thinking of Martha, the woman he believed to be in love with. Even when he was marching with his soldiers, he was daydreaming about her. “Jimmy's thoughts are consumed by Martha and he often daydreams about her when he should be paying attention to leading his men through the villages of Vietnam” (Overview: “The Things They Carried” par.2). Tim O’Brien states this, “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” (599). This lack of focus has a huge impact on Jimmy’s squad, they need a real leader to guide them, provide them with physical and emotional support, and assume the

Mary Anne is portrayed as the best woman in the book. She is only seventeen and her high school sweetheart, Mark Fossie, arranges it so

During the early 1800's women were stuck in the Cult of Domesticity. Women had been issued roles as the moral keepers for societies as well as the nonworking house-wives for families. Also, women were considered unequal to their male companions legally and socially. However, women’s efforts during the 1800’s were effective in challenging traditional intellectual, social, economical, and political attitudes about a women’s place in society.

The Greenies report that "a couple of times they almost saw her sliding through the shadows," but she would never return from the jungle (O'Brien 125). "She was part of the land" (125). Like Kurtz, Mary Anne crosses the line by losing her self-control to a primordial madness because of the forces of the Vietnam environment.