Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

In Tim O'Brien's story "The Things They Carried" we see how O'Brien uses symbolism in order to indirectly give us a message and help us to connect to what the soldiers are thinking and feeling. During a war soldiers tend to take with them items from home kind of as a security blanket. The items they normally take with them tend to reveal certain characteristics of their personality.

Negative experiences can have lifelong effects on a person, no matter what situation they were in. They live the rest of their lives with flashbacks, nightmares, and survivor’s trauma. Some trauma survivors have help coping with the effects of their situation but most people don’t have any way of coping with what they have seen and gone through. In Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, the narrator, Tim O’Brien, writes the stories about the Vietnam War that he was in, 20 years after the war ends. The narrator O’Brien has trouble with coping after the war so he writes stories about the war describing what they went through in detail. He was fresh out of college when he was drafted into the war, so he was very young and inexperienced. He had to go into a war that he knew nothing about and

In The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, the Vietnam War is used as a backdrop to show the hardships and lives of the young soldiers. Made up of a series of independently standing stories, the novel blends the line between fact and fiction. The definition of ‘truth’ is twisted in order to better convey the emotions behind the stories.

Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried follows the experiences of O’Brien himself among other American soldiers he fought with throughout the Vietnam War. While he claims that the entire story is a work of fiction, some of the events portrayed throughout the novel did, in fact, actually happen to him and his peers to an extent. The whole novel is not written on a linear timeline, but it rather reads similar to a collection of short stories that all tie together to an extent. While he was in combat, O’Brien saw a wide variety of deaths, but he also managed to bond with the other members of his platoon, each having their own personal experiences and beliefs regarding the war itself among other topics. Although the war gave Tim O’Brien a

In Tim O’Brien’s Novel The Things They Carried , carrying something wasn’t always physical. Soldiers will, and always have to, carry things that are not only tangible, but intangible as well. “They carried the land itself-Vietnam, the place, the soil-powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.” (…) In these few sentences Tim O’Brien shows that the soldiers as well as himself carried more than just weaponry. “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.” (…) Soldiers carry their lives and souls with them during the war. Their psychological understanding, compassion, and love intangible things they

The Things They Carried is a collection of fictional stories inspired by Tim O’Brien’s time in the Vietnam War and the struggles young men had to face in one of the most controversial wars in U.S. history. After the Vietnam War was over, when the veterans came home, most of which were drafted, they shunned by the American public for fighting a war in which many did not support and many veterans were homeless due to the lack of support from the government. Therefore, O’Brien uses these stories to not only have a deeper meaning and understanding of what the soldiers had to endure (both during and after the war), yet to also keep the dead alive by telling their stories. To do so, Tim O’Brien effectively

The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien, tackles a major issue, story-wise, in the section of the book entitled "Good Form". He explains the difference between the reality of life and the story truths that he displays to the reader. He claims that, "I watched a man die a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. " (O'Brien 179). He claims that he wants the reader to, " feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth. " (O'Brien 179). The author is saying that the reality does not fully encompass the emotions that these stories bring to light. By setting himself as the murderer of that man O'Brien is able to better connect to the reader. It gives logical reason to why O'Brien remembered

In Tim O’Brien’s, The Things They Carried, he was describing the life of soldiers in the Vietnam War. As the topic of the short story suggests, O’Brien was discussing what soldiers carried around and needed facing their harsh experiences during the war. It seemed that the struggles of the soldiers were not only about facing death or having a hard lifestyle in which they carried their safety equipment, food, medical supplies, and even sometimes their dope. The struggles included burdens related to habits, tasks, beliefs, and emotions.(1)

In “The Things They Carried”, by Tim O’Brien, the narrator introduces the reader to the protagonist, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, who is in charge of a platoon of soldiers during the Vietnam War. O’Brien initiates by explaining to the reader that to carry something means to “hump”. O’Brien further explains that for our protagonist, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, he specifically “humps” photographs, letters and mementos of the woman he loves, Martha. The lieutenant has such an emotional attachment to everything he receives from Martha, that for him, it becomes problematic through the story since it leads to the death of one of his soldiers in the alpha team. He blames himself because when Lavender is shot, he is distracted, thinking of Martha, when he could’ve

The school board has proposed that works of fiction should be removed from the curriculum of all english classes, that is a not a good choice because making a curriculum is very difficult and lengthy. The students would have to learn how to find themes and lessons in literature without actually putting it into use in the classroom. The board would then have to invest into new textbooks as the ones we have now have works of fiction in them and getting new books is costly.The piece of literature that I will be referring to in this writing the most is a book ‘’The Things They Carried’’ by Tim o’Brien. It is a fictional book that takes place in the Vietnam war and the narrator which happens to be the author is part of a squad in the United states

War does so much to a person, that it will leave not only physical scars but also mental scars. Tim O’Brien shows us in the book “The Things They Carried” how men change. How he shows it is he uses women and girl in his stories at opposites to the way of war. Through these girls, the men keep going and try to survive a brutal battle inside themselves and outside of them.

The Things They Carried is a novel based off O’Brien’s experiences in the Vietnam War and the men he served with. His novel can be considered a historical primary source because the details are accurate and the experiences somewhat true because they are common occurrences that could have happened to anyone during a war. The way he writes his short stories is in a way that is easy to understand and learn from. The information he presents in the book is clear and the stories interesting and concise. Tim O’Brien does a wonderful job presenting a fact filled fictional book about the Vietnam War. Although the stories are considered fictional, the inspiration had to have come from actual events. The narrator is able to take a step back and present stories from an objective point of view, as if he is just stating fact, but at the same time able to bring an emotional component into it. The omniscient point of view enables the readers to get into the minds of the characters and feel what they feel. This book demonstrates the harsh realities of war and what happens and its’ effects. Most books about wars list numbers, locations, and details that are hard to understand, but O’Brien perfectly captures the point of views of real life soldiers and shows readers how the war was from a soldier’s point of view rather than from a journalist or

The Things They Carried is a fictional account of the nature of men during the Vietnam War. The power of the novel comes from the blurring of the line between fiction and non-fiction. Tim O’Brien used his actual memoir as a Vietnam soldier with a collection of what that appear to be fictional short stories that he credited to the members of his platoon. This style of writing shows that a person's subjective thoughts and feelings about an event, which O'Brien calls story-truth, is more meaningful than an objective factual account of the events, which O'Brien calls happening-truth. O'Brien blurs the line between fact and fiction right from the start when O'Brien dedicates the novel to the individual soldiers in his platoon, which the reader

In the selection from the short story "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien the First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries letters from Martha, an English major at Mount Sebastian college, He always has the letters for him and he cherishes them deeply, This is proven on page 3 and 4 when it says " Unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his rucksack, slowly." but at the end of the selection he burns the pictures and the letters from Martha. He isn't better off with burning the letters. The letters and the pictures from Martha are what gave him the motivation to win the war, and if he won he could see Martha. There what made him

“First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha” (O'Brien, 1990). This is how we are introduced to Cross. He is a young soldier that is responsible for his platoon. He is only 22 years old. He carries his love for a young lady by the name of Martha. He also