The Things They Carried Rhetorical Analysis Essay

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.

how beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. In War is a Racket, the

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, every soldier carried something different; different equipment, different memories, and different guilt. Their equipment would change as they travelled through the book, but one common thing that the soldiers would all be forced to carry is the weight of losing one of their own. Though it might weight differently from man to man, changing depending on how well they knew the soldier, it is a weight they all felt. Though several soldiers died in The Things They Carried, the loss of a soldier named Kiowa was different from the others. But why? What impact did Kiowa have in The Things They Carried, and why did his death affect the other characters differently than the previous deaths in the novel?

Since the beginning of time, humans have sought after power and control. It is human instinct to desire to be the undisputed champion, but when does it become a problem? Warfare has been practiced throughout civilization as a way to justify power. Though the orders come directly from one man, thousands of men and women pay the ultimate sacrifice. In Randall Jerrell’s “The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner”, Jarrell is commenting on the brutality of warfare. Not only does Jarrell address the tragedies of war, he also blames politics, war leaders, and the soldier’s acknowledgement of his duties. (Hill 6) With only five lines of text, his poems allows the reader to understand what a soldier can go through. With the use of Jerrell’s poem, The Vietnam War, and Brian Turner’s “Ameriki Jundee”, the truth of combat will be revealed.

“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” (O’Brien 20). A weight that the soldiers carry were not only physical, but emotional. In the novel, The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, explains the physical and emotional hardships the soldiers dealt with. The physical “things” they carried were literal and the emotional “things” were figurative. They physically carried weapons, equipment, photographs, food, and lucky charms. On the other hand, they carried fear, loss, grief, and guilt. All though there are many other characters that carried emotions, Lieutenant

“War is Hell!” These three words have stood the test of time and numerous wars. These words uttered by General William Sherman, a unionist Civil War Veteran, perfectly describe the hardships faced by all soldiers, from the American Revolutionist to the modern day soldier in Afghanistan. Tim O’Brien served in the Vietnam Conflict from 1968 to 1970, (O’Brien 1131) during some of the most intense fighting known as the Tet Offensive (Durkin). During the conflict 58,202 Americans were killed in action (Durkin) and hundreds of thousands, more were left with not only the physical scars of war but the emotional ones too. In the short story “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien uses symbolism and conflict to show that soldiers often carry more weight than what is on their backs.

The Things They Carried Short Writing Project Luke Wakumoto Paragraph #1 In Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien made a distinction between a true and a fake war story. He states that a true war story isn’t morally black/white, doesn’t encourage bravery/ethics, nor is it ever uplifting. This is important to the story as it implies some of the stories he tells is untrue, making him an unreliable narrator. Also, the false stories, while not true, are still important as they represent major themes (such as innocence and courage) O’Brien, the author explains the contrast between a real and a false war story.

In this essay, I will discuss how Tim O’Brien’s works “The Things They Carried” and “If I Die in a Combat Zone” reveal the individual human stories that are lost in war. In “The Things They Carried” O’Brien reveals the war stories of Alpha Company and shows how human each soldier is. In “If I Die in a Combat Zone” O’Brien tells his story with clarity, little of the dreamlike quality of “Things They Carried” is in this earlier work, which uses more blunt language that doesn’t hold back. In “If I Die” O’Brien reveals his own personal journey through war and what he experienced. O’Brien’s works prove a point that men, humans fight wars, not ideas. Phil Klay’s novel “Redeployment” is another novel that attempts to humanize soldiers in war. “Redeployment” is an anthology series, each chapter attempts to let us in the head of a new character – set in Afghanistan or in the United States – that is struggling with the current troubles of war. With the help of Phil Klay’s novel I will show how O’Brien’s works illustrate and highlight each story that make a war.

Poets frequently utilize vivid images to further depict the overall meaning of their works. The imagery in “& the War Was in Its Infancy Then,” by Maurice Emerson Decaul, conveys mental images in the reader’s mind that shows the physical damage of war with the addition of the emotional effect it has on a person. The reader can conclude the speaker is a soldier because the poem is written from a soldier’s point of view, someone who had to have been a first hand witness. The poem is about a man who is emotionally damaged due to war and has had to learn to cope with his surroundings. By use of imagery the reader gets a deeper sense of how the man felt during the war. Through the use of imagery, tone, and deeper meaning, Decaul shows us the

Stereotypes are like a type of infectious sickness that wears down a person’s true character, and they produce a sort of blindness to characteristics that are worthwhile. Stereotypes perpetuate false and unnecessary judgments, and they devalue humans. When people are placed in a group, they are limited and marginalized by those making judgments. Any factors such as race, religion, gender, and personality can be the source of a stereotype, so anyone can become a victim. Stereotypes are conclusions drawn by people that are heavily influenced by peers, family, pre-existing knowledge, and the media, and that too often become accepted societal biases. Historically, in the United States, stereotypes and stereotype threats have always existed, especially

I had just finished reading a book set in World War I, in which one of the characters was a soldier who served as an ambulance driver. His job was to drive into the middle of the battlefield, pick up wounded soldiers, and take them to the army field hospital. In the midst of all the horror, pain, and death of war, this man tasked himself with finding beauty in the otherwise bleak and dismal landscape of war. When he found something beautiful, he wrote it down in a notebook he carried. He had noted a flower struggling to poke through the trampled earth, a soldier’s

Stereotypes are one of the most common issues, today and throughout history, that cause our nation to be divided. It has a problem inside and out of country. Stereotypes range from false guarantees to bad interpretations. According to Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior, stereotypes are, “based on real or imagined differences between groups, attaches values to those differences in ways that benefit the dominant group at the expense of minorities and is

War leads to memories. Horrible memories, mostly. However, sometimes there are moments of pure happiness, of love of lust and of freedom. Many texts have been written about war or during war, a lot of which have stimulated us into empathy, despair, happiness, action and much more. Both the text “Dulce et Decorum Est” (Wilfred Owen, 1917) and the letter to George W. Bush (2004) , are texts in which the horrible conditions of soldiers in two completely different, yet also terrifyingly similar, wars are brought to light., differences that are largely accounted for by the contexts in which they were written.

Sharp blasts of explosions ring in the distance. A rain of blood and guts soak into the dust covered corpses. Bleeding appendages are scattered around the field. This is the reality of war. The goal of war may never be fulfilled despite the many deaths. Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” question the impact of Hemingway’s Frederic Henry and Lowell’s Colonel Shaw on the war and world. Although Hemingway demolishes the ideals of honor in battle, Lowell commends the perseverance and sacrifices the soldiers make. Henry’s disillusionment to glory and Shaw’s exaltation after death demonstrate how war’s harsh reality prevails over fantastical ideals.