Theme Of Guilt In Speaking Of Courage By OTwain

O’Brien always questioned the idea of “enemies”. Throughout the book he questioned in many ways and asked why were they enemies. What have they done to make them enemies, he sought for answers to his questions and eventually justified them by “if I don't kill them then they will kill me”.He was afraid of both killing, and dying but he knew that if he didn’t kill then he himself would be dead. These experiences and suppression of ideas are what led O’Brien’s to write The Things They Carried. In real life, Tim O'Brien feared the war and wrote this book to persuade others and to plant an idea in their head about the horrors that they should not want to suffer. Tim portrays his fear of the war by sharing his experiences as stories. Tim portrays many of his fears

After being drafted, several thoughts came to his mind. O’ Brien thought about how his life will be if he goes to war. He states, “I imagined myself dead. I imagined myself doing things I could not do- charging and enemy position, taking aim at another human being” (44). It seems that O’Brien thought about his principles and morals as a human being. He believes killing innocent people was not a heroic act; it was an act of shame. On the other hand, he clarifies that not all wars are negative, “There were occasions, when a nation was justified in using military force to achieve it ends” (44). He considered to fight only in the cases were war is necessary to achieve a significant purpose. O’Brien uses examples of Hitler, referring him as an evil and one of the reasons he would have validated a war, and even joined the military if it were necessary. Yet, he does not want to play hero in a war that had not sense. For that reason, he decided to run away from his draft.

When truth became distorted by the ambiguous or absent motive for war, the soldiers needed to make up their own truths in order to keep sane enough to live through the senselessness and fear. Along with the fact that O’Brien’s boyhood died after killing the man in the path, his conception of truth died as well. He examines this fact when his daughter Kathleen asks him, “Daddy tell the truth, did you ever kill anybody?” and O’Brien ponders this stating, “And I can say, honestly, ‘Of course not.’ Or I can

During the story in “The Man I Killed” O’Brien’s use of such detailed imagery shows the reader that this experience has given O’Brien lots of emotional baggage. With all of this emotional baggage, O’Brien thinks very irrationally by explicitly remembering detail about his experience. O’Brien also tends to keep repeating phrases whenever this occurs. During the story about Norman Bowker in “Speaking of Courage” O’Brien again gives the reader very detailed imagery of the details in the story. The emotional baggage attached to Norman Bowker from his experience with Kiowa’s death causes him to act very irrationally by wading into a lake fully clothed, and later killing himself with no precursor or warning

O’Brien knows this. He does not shy away from long, thoughtful passages that explain the basic realities of battlefield life. Look at In the Field, when Jimmy Cross tries to think of what precisely caused Kiowa’s death. “You could blame the war. You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going into it... In the field, though, the causes were immediate. A moment of carelessness or bad judgment or plain stupidity carried consequences that lasted forever” (O’Brien 169). This passage articulates the immediacy and constant danger of war. Every moment, every river or rainstorm could mean death. That is what Lamott might call “meat-and-potato truth” to the soldiers. A concept so poignant can easily transcend words, and if O’Brien had had any reluctance to delve so deeply into how the Lieutenant thinks, it could have been lost in translation. Only through O’Brien’s intimate musing comes a shadow of enormous reality, the “meat-and-potato

In If I die In a Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien, the author shows how the hatred of war can cause remorse and sadness through memories. He uses his experiences as a radio operator in Vietnam war to showcase the range of emotions he was feeling at the time. O’Brien shows this by using memories and his comrades to paint a picture on how the war in Vietnam affected him for the rest of his life. O’Brien shows how he felt about the war through memories. Even though he opposes the war he still finds himself unable to disconnect from it.

The novel itself is a flashback to the pass of a nightmare that he will never forget. O’ Brien is still alive, I cannot imagine having flash backs to the past and being reminded of a frightening nightmare. The best flashback in the novel reads “his right arm was gone… At his face there were already many flies and gnats.” O’Brien then revisits his childhood: “Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love…. she died of course. Nine years old and she died.” This situation in the time of war brought him to think of someone he truly loved. Flashbacks are

O’Brien fought in the war and named his fictional character after himself. It is the truth of his real life juxtaposed to the truth in his

This quote in the first chapter of the book sets the overall tone. The author Tim O’Brien uses his language through out the book in an extremely straightforward manner. He does not sugar coat the way going to war and being in a war is. He does not use stories of heroes,

In the chapter “Rainy River” O’Brien addresses the theme of storytelling and memory. In “Rainy River” O’Brien is trying to decide whether to go to war or to go and escape to Canada. He chose to go to war but he feels as though he's choosing for his country and not for himself. He felt like he had no option, no choice and his future was already set. “I felt paralyzed. All around me the options seemed to be narrowing as if they were hurling down a huge black funnel, the world squeezing in tight” (O’Brien 41). He didn't agree with the reasons for the war, and he did not want to go. The choices between war and living his life were close. He tells the story to portray his feelings to the war, he knows he's not cut out for the war. He felt as though he would be letting his country down by not going. Looking back onto his decision through memories he knows how hard the decision wah but he's glad he made it because he felt like he helped the country in a big

During this work, O’Brien keeps a casual tone. It sometimes gets more formal and serious, but for the most part, it’s friendly and almost playful. When he is describing the conversations he had with his friends, he looks back on them with happiness. Consequently, when he is describing the death of one of his friends, his tone gets more somber and less playful. For example, the entire chapter of “Stockings” is devoted to describing the soldier Henry Dobbins and an interesting knack of his. “Even now, twenty years later, I can see him wrapping his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck before heading out on an ambush.” This cute, two page chapter provides a bit of relief after the chapter about Mary Anne Belle. It has light connotations and is a generally funny short story. Later in the book, however, he gets more serious when talking about the death of his dear friend Kiowa. He

Though each story was written to convey the miseries associated with war, they convey the effects of such psychological wounds differently. In, “The Red Convertible, we understand Henry’s struggles through the eyes of his brother, Lyman. As a result, the reader doesn’t have a clear understanding about the tribulations Henry actually faced during the war. Instead, we see how his relationship with his younger brother has been altered. Contrastingly, in, “The Things They Carried”, we are able to gauge the struggles faced by soldiers firsthand. What I thought was interesting about O’Brien’s work is that the events were not laid out chronologically, unlike the other story. I feel that this style choice is meant to coincide with what it is actually like to be placed in a high risk situation, such as war. During a stressful event, people tend to act impulsively and, or, irrationally. They’re not thinking about

Telling a war story will be changed for everyone depending on their experience and the different wars they been to. In The Thing They Carried telling a true war story is different because O’Brien says that it needs to be a heroic and noble and very specific “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seems to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed” (pg.67-68) it shows how O’Brien wants to impress the audience with his stories that makes one wonder if it is real or not. He wants to sound heroic which makes part of the purpose of the story, his side

O'Brien gives his characters lives outside the story and dedicates his fiction to their memory. In On the Rainy River, for example, O'Brien writes that he never really thanked the old man

This certainly comes out in the fragging incident, when the squad kills Lieutenant Sidney Martin. But there's something more. Another time, O'Brien was quoted as saying, "My concerns have to do with the abstractions: ... How does one do right in an evil situation?" (Bates 263). That is the big question, of course, that this novel deals with. See, the point that O'Brien is making is not that war is an evil situation. He's trying to take that for granted and move beyond. Now that you've got this evil situation, what do you do?