The Things They Carried By Tim O ' Brien

In “The Things They Carried”, Tim O’Brien presents a different perspective on what war is really about, along with the burdens constantly borne by soldiers. Through his use of flashbacks, imagery, and pathos, O’Brien shows just how the life of a soldier is much more than war and violence, but combating the burdens of life that soldiers carry with them.

In The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien uses many short stories to describe his experience in Vietnam. The story that captured many aspects of writing was “How to Tell a True War Story” because it acts as a guide to writing a true story. O’Brien uses many different rhetorical strategies, narrative techniques, and establishes a theme in this story to help develop his characters and story line.

In Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”, O’Brien created several allusions that each character endured during the Vietnam War. Throughout the story were vast representations of the things soldiers carried both mentally and physically. The things they carried symbolized their individual roles internally and externally. In addition to symbolism, imagination was a focal theme that stood out amongst the characters. This particular theme played a role as the silent killer amongst Lt. Cross and the platoon both individually and collectively as a group. The theme of imagination created an in depth look of how the war was perceived through each character which helped emphasize their thoughts from an emotional stand point of being young men out at war.

Through The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien moves beyond the horror of fighting in the Vietnam War to examine with sensitivity and insight the nature of courage and fear. Included, is a collection of interrelated stories. A few of the stories are brutal, while others are flawed, blurring the distinction between fact and fiction. All the stories, however, deal with one platoon. Some are about the wartime experiences of soldiers, and others are about a 43-year-old writer reminiscing about his platoon’s experiences. In the beginning chapter, O’Brien rambles about the items the soldiers carry into battle, ranging from can openers, pocketknives, and mosquito repellent o

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.

While the Vietnam War was a complex political pursuit that lasted only a few years, the impact of the war on millions of soldiers and civilians extended for many years beyond its termination. Soldiers killed or were killed; those who survived suffered from physical wounds or were plagued by PTSD from being wounded, watching their platoon mates die violently or dealing with the moral implications of their own violence on enemy fighters. Inspired by his experiences in the war, Tim O’Brien, a former soldier, wrote The Things They Carried, a collection of fictional and true war stories that embody the

In “The Things They Carried” Tim O’Brien uses this story as a coping mechanism; to tell part of his stories and others that are fiction from the Vietnamese War. This is shown by using a fictions character’s voice, deeper meaning in what soldier’s carried, motivation in decision making, telling a war story, becoming a new person and the outcome of a war in one person. Tim O’ Brien uses a psychological approach to tell his sorrows, and some happiness from his stories from the war. Each part, each story is supposed to represent a deeper meaning on how O’Brien dealt, and will deal with his past. In war, a way to

Many authors use storytelling as a vehicle to convey the immortality of past selves and those who have passed to not only in their piece of literature but in their life as an author. In Tim O’Brien’s work of fiction The Things They Carried, through his final chapter “The Lives of the Dead,” O 'Brien conveys that writing is a matter of survival since, the powers of storytelling can ensure the immortality of all those who were significant in his life. Through their immortality, O’Brien has the ability to save himself with a simple story. Through snippets of main plot event of other chapters, O’Brien speaks to the fact the dead have not actually left; they are gone physically, but not spiritually or emotionally. They live on in memories as Linda lives on in the memories of O’Brien and as many of his war buddies live on through his stories. He can revive them and bring them back to the world through his writings and through these emotions or events he experienced with them and with their deaths can make them immortal. Through the reminiscent stories of Linda and O’Brien’s war companions and himself, O’Brien conveys that storytelling allows people to reanimate others who have died and past selves to create an immortality of humans.

In the story The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien didn’t mention anything about traditional war heroes. I think this was a great idea, because there are no traditional war heroes. A traditional war hero is someone who is fearless and someone who can’t be harmed mentally or emotionally. But in The Things They Carried the soldiers out on the front lines were emotionally and physically scarred. Tim O’Brien didn’t write about traditional war heroes, O’Brien wrote about normal people, people with different views on the Vietnam war, and how the war affected these people.

Every one of us has experienced a strong emotional fear, and in that moment of stress, we learn more about who we are. The short story “The Things They Carried”, by Tim O’Brien, follows the lives of soldiers trying to survive the emotional and physical stresses of the Vietnam War. Throughout the story, O’Brien juxtaposes the physical weight of the supplies that the soldiers must carry with the immeasurable weight of their intense emotional experiences. The theme of “The Things They Carried” is the burden of fear, which O’Brien portrays through the counter-weight of objects the soldiers cling to for consolation and escape. Some men turn to objects that remind them of love, no matter how unlikely it is that they are loved back. Other men

In "The Things They Carried," O'Brien made reference to the Vietnam war that was closely associated with the physical, psychological, and emotional weight the soldiers beared.  The overall method of presentation of this story incorporated many different outlooks on the things the soldiers carried, dealt with, and were forced to adapt to.  In addition to this, O'Brien showed us the many reasons why and how the soldiers posessed these things individually and collectively and how they were associated directly and indirectly.  The strong historical content in "The Things They Carried" helped emphasize the focus of the story and establish a clearer understanding of details in the

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

Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” is about the famous Vietnam War. The book includes many stories which does not require to read the chapters in chronological order. O'Brien was drafted in the war in 1968, which was the year the war peaked. O’Brien was set for life with scholarships from Harvard. He didn’t believe in the war which made fighting the war that much harder. O’Brien includes stories from before, during, and after the war; however he doesn’t write the story with the “before, during, and after” layout. He writes the novel in “ during, before,during, after, before,...” layout. He includes many characters in his novel however only a few from his platoon are included throughout each chapter. There is Kiowa, Lavender, Azar, Rat, and Jimmy Cross. Also Henry Dobbins, Bob jorgenson, Curt Lemon, Mary Ann, Mark Fossie, Dave Jenson, Lee Strunk, and many more who play important roles in this novel. The feelings in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried represents the intangible weight the soldiers carried along with their packs they humped; intangible weight slowed down the soldiers more than the weight of their gear.

“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’ Brien is a story in which the author details the possessions the emotions and the memories which were carried by the soldiers into the Vietnam War. The accuracy fact fullness and the attention to details make this story a truthful experience, riding on a thin line between fiction and a reality. It embodies the transformation that a soldier in a war zone undergoes. The author being a war veteran himself captures the events in a vivid manner. The two works of literature serve as an authentic and knowledgeable depiction of men fighting a war. They not only carry the weight of weaponry and ammunitions and supplies needed but also the weight of the struggle and the violent deaths that surround them which weigh heavier than the items they carried. The outcomes of war for the side that wins or loses results in devastation of the people but the soldiers are the ones who carry with them the memories of pain and struggle long after the war ends. Every war is partly fought on the ground and partly in the mind of soldiers.

In The Things They Carried written by Tim O’Brien, an established author and veteran in the war in Vietnam, he recalls events about himself and his platoon in the war, expressing true and fictional events, in order to show the reader what the war was truly like. To reinforce his purpose of showing the audience what the war was like, he contrasts two extremely unlike places; the United States and Vietnam. He specifically focuses on the pleasantness and safeness of the United States versus the dangerousness and foreignness of Vietnam, the culture shock due to the routineness of society in the United States as opposed to the chaotic society in Vietnam, and the common referencing of skills learned and things carried from Vietnam back to the United States.