The Things They Carried Essay On War

The items the soldiers carry hold a substantial amount of credibility throughout each personal story; however, within O’Brien’s story, he lacks credibility aside from the obvious tangible elements of the items held, questioning where the truth lies within these evidential fragments of the soldiers’ lives. These personal accounts of exact measurements attest the reader’s knowledge of war as well as the mental ability to calculate the exact weight upon each person’s hump through a fiction of mental and emotional agility. O’Brien quotes within Chen’s criticism stating, “A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe” (Chen 77). This background knowledge of O’Brien’s theory that an “absolute occurrence is irrelevant because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth,”(Chen 77) places the credibility of the information upon the emotional accounts that O’Brien’s writing bestows upon the personalities of the soldiers. The “academic tone that at times makes the narrative sound like a government report (Kaplan 45),” adds documentation like analysis of these compilations of war endeavors as told by the narrator. Kaplan continues that the “transitional phrases such as “for instance” and “in addition,”’ (Kaplan 45) as well as “whole paragraphs dominated by sentences that begin with “because,”” (Kaplan 45) convince certainty of the

In the short story, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” by Tim O’Brien, the author shows that no matter what the circumstances were, the people that were exposed to the Vietnam War were affected greatly. A very young girl named Mary Anne Bell was brought by a boyfriend to the war in Vietnam. When she arrived she was a bubbly young girl, and after a few weeks, she was transformed into a hard, mean killer.

Anything can change a person if they are not ready for that change. The short story Sweetheart of The Song Tra Bong, in Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien represents this by showing change in Mary Anne, who is a character the reader probably would not expect to see in a book about the Vietnam War. There are many parts show the change in her from the average high school girl she used to be into a predatory killer, but there is only one reason for her change, and that is the war itself.

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

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien uses the art of fabricating stories as a coping mechanism. Trying to distinguish the difference between fictional and factual stories is a challenge in this book, but literal truth cannot capture the real violence that the soldiers dealt with in Vietnam, only “story truth” can. He explains, “If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made victim of a very old and terrible lie.” (O’Brien 65). The novel illustrates that storytelling is a way to keep the dead alive, even if it may not be a true story.

War is a paradoxical concept and with it comes many problems, problems that are the result of indirect or direct conflict. In The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, war is all around the characters. They are in the heart of Vietnam and because of that, soldiers must face difficult life events that enfold in the jungle. Tim O’Brien wants the reader to understand that by using stories the soldiers can distract themselves from the war, remember and honor the lost, and lastly to keep their own sanity.

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

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

Young men who are sent to a war learn the reality in a very harsh and brutal way. Both the stories, ‘The Red Convertible’ and ‘The Things They Carried’ portray the life of a young soldier and how he psychologically gets affected from all the things he had seen in the war. Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried,’ is more specific on the experiences of a soldier during a war where as Karen Louise Erdrich focuses more on describing the post war traumatic stress in her short story ‘The Red Convertible’. One thing similar in both the narrations is the Vietnam War and its consequences on the soldiers. From the background of both the authors it’s easy to conclude that Tim O’Brien being a war veteran emphasizes more on 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

In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien the author tells about his experiences in the Vietnam war by telling various war stories. The quote, "It has been said of war that it is a world where the past has a strong grip on the present, where machines seemed sometimes to have more will power than me, where nice boys (girls) were attracted to them, where bodies ruptured and burned and stand, where the evil thing trying to kill you could look disconnecting human and where except in your imagination it was impossible to be heroic." relates to each of his stories.

Storytelling does not tell the total truth from every memory. Memories do not last forever like stories do. As the soldiers in The Things They Carried tell war stories, they have to twist their memory while retelling stories because otherwise their audience may not believe them. The author Tim O’Brien says, “You can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (O’Brien 65) because war is not the best thing ever to happen to people. Storytelling does not always come from the total truth but the experience of the

Change In The Things They Carried a war novel by Tim O'Brien, we are told many short stories compiled to make a whole. I want to emphasis on the importance of the chapter "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong". In this chapter we are introduced to the character Mary Anne. She shows the changing power of Vietnam, that a sweet innocent young girl can come into this land and be forever consumed by her surroundings. The speaker show us this through character action, character description, dialogue and metaphor; this enhances the literary work by showing us that the soldiers will always be a part of Vietnam no matter how hard they try to get away from it.

First, the reader must understand just what makes a good "war story". The protagonist of the novel, Tim O'Brien, gives us his

Most authors who write about war stories write vividly; this is the same with Tim O’Brien as he describes the lives of the soldiers by using his own experiences as knowledge. In his short story “The Things They Carried” he skillfully reveals realistic scenes that portray psychological, physical and mental burdens carried by every soldier. He illustrates these burdens by discussing the weights that the soldiers carry, their psychological stress and the mental stress they have to undergo as each of them endure the harshness and ambiguity of the Vietnam War. One question we have to ask ourselves is if the three kinds of burdens carried by the soldier’s are equal in size? “As if in slow motion, frame by frame, the world would take on the old