Tim O Brien Critical Analysis

He lay with one leg bent beneath him, his jaw in his throat, his face neither expressive nor inexpressive. One eye was shut. The other was a star shaped hole.” (124). Tim had never killed before; the man he is describing here was his first official kill. O’Brien stared straight into the dead man’s eyes for a long period of time, unsure of how to cope with the situation.

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

If Tim O’Brien does not change something in his characters he will not make a good point on war’s effect on peoples’ life. For example, also if Mary Anne Bell and if Timmy does not change the reader will not learn something from that chapter because that in the novel Tim O’Brien was trying to send the reader message about how war and a loved person death can change and effect people in a horrible way. If a person fights in war he or she usually change in a negative way and in the novel Tim O’Brien mostly focuses on the negative change caused from war but he also talks about positive changes like when he makes friends. The theme of change always takes a huge role in many novels, T.V shows and

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

Tim O’Brien is a great example of lost innocence. He gives full proof examples on how his innocence was lost, not only in the war, but before the war as well. O’Brien (character) speaks into depth about his loss of innocence in the last chapter of the novel, The Lives of the Dead, here he tells the story of how he experienced love and death at the same time. Linda was O’Brien 's (character) first love, when they were nine years old they fell in love, and the character O’Brien describes that although they were so young he truly felt that this was true love. Linda had cancer, and soon after their first date Linda passed away. She was the first loss of innocence for him, she was the first dead body he had ever seen, and that was extremely hard on him, as it would be for any nine year old, or anyone seeing someone they thought they were deeply in love with. Linda was the reason that O’Brien began writing in the first place. In order to make sense of his life O’Brien began to write to deal with the hard times. He believes that stories can help you deal with the issues in your life, reflecting on the good times, or fantasizing about what you want to actually occur. “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the

Tim O’Brien composed an amazing book about his views towards the Vietnam war and his life during his time serving in the war. He brings you a different perspective that changes with time and as he becomes hardened to the tragedies of war. Despite his obvious bias he has created an intriguing story that can open the eyes of many to different subjects and the reality that is war.

At different points in our lives we change, but are we always the same person? Most would say yes, even though we grow up and our appearances change we mainly keep our values and ways of thinking. Tim O’Brien the author of The Things They Carried tackles the idea of changing personalities and thought processes, by writing different stories about his friends from the war. He argues that the trauma from experiencing literal and metaphorical death can turn you into a completely different person.

O’Brien may have believed it in the beginning, when he was still a “greenie”, but one exposure to the real war environment can quickly change his mind. War is not like the movies, movies that shows the perfect courageous good always defeating the obvious evil. It’s impossible for a real soldier to follow the footsteps of heroes in entertainment, and he wants to emphasize this point to the readers: “You’re not human anymore. You’re a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, or leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted or believed in. You know you’re about to die. And it’s not a movie and you aren’t a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait” (211). The emotions he feels at the time is hard to put into words, and so he makes the reader try to experience it, just as he wants Bobby Jorgenson to experience it. Because O’Brien has accumulated familiarity with this irrational fear soldiers experience, he feels like this is a punishment suitable in its notoriety for a new soldier like Jorgenson, and would hopefully get back at the pain he had endured from the medic’s failed aid to his gunshot

A little girl who would always have a cape on even though people picked on her for wearing it. She had a good reason for wearing it, She had a brain tumor and O’Brien knew that and he still loved her. She would soon die after making it through her last summer and part of september. “My mom told me at lunch time. No lie, My mom said she kicked the goddang bucket.” (page 222) This story is particularly sad to me because he tells about how in Vietnam, death was so relevant they came up with ways to make the dead seem less dead. This is sad to me because no one should be so close to death so many times they have to come up with ways to make the dead seem alive. “Laying in bed at night, I made up elaborate stories to bring Linda alive in my sleep. I invented my own dreams. It sounds impossible, I know, but I did it.” (Page

In this passage Tim O’Brien uses personification so beautifully and simply to become the Earth itself. He describes himself to be a part of the night and the land itself. The night could symbolize being at peace as well as a tinge of loneliness. The land could symbolize being at war with himself internally. Later in the passage he tells the reader that he is Nam itself, the horror and the war. He wants the reader to become engulfed in his war story and to understand his pain.

Tim O’Brien is known for sharing his life stories with the world. In many of his stories and memoirs he goes into detail about his experiences in the Vietnam War. As quoted from Tim O’Brien, “My passion[s] as a human being and as a writer intersect in Vietnam, not in the physical stuff but in the issues of Vietnam -- of courage, rectitude, enlightenment, holiness, trying to do the right thing in the world” (Chin 1062). Both of his stories Ambush and The Things They Carried are memories of what happened to and around him during the war. He goes into detail about the war and the hardships he had to face to survive. Especially in The Things They Carried he emphasizes the physical and emotional traumas the characters had to face. Tim O’Brien is an influential American author who is highly known for his memoirs and stories such as Ambush and The Things They Carried.

The truth is personal and relative to the person of interest. One’s truth might be someone else’s lie. Tim O’Brien is a well-known American novelist most famous for writing metafiction stories of soldiers in the Vietnam War. Raised in Austin, Minnesota, and drafted to the War at the age of 22, O’Brien felt the urge of conveying the true feelings of war to a society that was blind to the efforts and struggles of soldiers in the Vietnam War at the time. The book The Things They Carried is a collection of linked short stories inspired by the author’s experience in the War, greatly influencing his career as an author. Through The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien defies the standard definition of truth as means to shed a new light in how stories

Similarly to how Hopkins has said that the surroundings do affect one’s life, yet furthermore, this idea is realistically revealed in the novel The Things They Carried through O’Brien’s life. O’Brien was a soldier during the Vietnam War, where he faced

O'Brien reacted to the old man's corpse in a very normal way which was in fear. Despite O'Brien being persuaded by his fellow soldiers to greet the body by shaking the hand and talking to it O'brien denies to do it. This demonstrates how O'Brien was still innocent at that moment as it was "too real for (him)" (226).

Some of the stories told by O’Brien were a little morbid the way some of the soldiers react to death. Curt Lemmon was killed by a mortar and blown up. O’Brien had to climb a tree to retrieve the remains of Lemmon. One of the soldiers makes a joke about it being a “lemon” tree. After Lemons death a fellow soldier Rat Kiley writes a long letter to Lemmon’s sister to tell her of the bad news. Kiley is very upset that there was never a response from the sister. Another story was told about a baby water buffalo that was tortured and killed after Lemmon’s death in