Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

The Vietnam War began when the North Vietnamese government and the Vietnam congress fighting to reunify Vietnam under communist rule. In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien uses themes such as love, shame and guilt to illustrate the tangible and intangible items the soldiers carry throughout the war and the rest of their lives.

At some time in life, a person will experience the death of a relative or lose something that was very important to him or her. After that traumatic event, will that person confront his or her pain, or will that person bury it deep within them? Both ways are possible, however, only one is effective in the long term. According to Tim O'Brien, the most effective way to heal after a traumatic experience is to share stories. In Tim’s book, The things they carried, he used the motifs of loneliness, life, and the mood of nostalgia to illustrate the importance of sharing stories during a healing process.

Very few authors who write fictional stories decide to mix fact with fiction to demonstrate certain ideas, however that is exactly what author Tim O’Brien does in the book The Things They Carried, to demonstrate what these soldiers had carried in the Vietnam War and after the war.

In the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross recalls past stories told by him and from fellow soldiers in his time overseas in Vietnam. Experiences and events soldiers faced in Vietnam can change the way people think, feel, and act.

No war is easy for the soldiers who put their lives on the line to fight for what they believe in. The soldiers on both sides of the Vietnam War faced challenges that changed their lives forever and left a lasting effect on their physical and mental health. The hardships faced in the Vietnam War as depicted in The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien are an accurate representation of the struggle faced by not only the soldiers fighting the war but also those who were involved in nonviolent positions.

Throughout the time period of the Vietnam War, the thousands of men who fought during this time were looked down upon. Many people in the United States were against the war and gave no appreciation to soldiers fighting the Vietnam War. In his novel, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien, showed the guilt and shame that soldiers themselves went through being in the Vietnam War. Through not feeling brave and heroic enough, or feeling the fear of embarrassing not only themselves, but their families and hometowns if they were to flee from the war, they constantly felt regret and shame. No matter where you look in the story of The Things They Carried, you will always see the shame and guilt the soldiers are carrying.

In “The Things they Carried,” Tim O’Brien uses contrasts and contradictions to reveal the impact that war had on people throughout the novel. The war had a great impact on all the characters, however, it affected Tim O’Brien, Mitchell Sanders, and Mary Anne the greatest. O’Brien is affected by the war the most, especially in the fact that he was the one who wrote a book about it. He begins the novel by describing experiences of him and his comrades. He discusses a moment in which Mitchel Sanders had gone home after a time in the war, and was having a perfect life.

Imagine for the rest of your life having to live with the burden of watching not only a fellow soldier, but a friend, die knowing there was nothing you could do about it. The novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien describes the encumbrances that many of the soldiers in the Vietnam War had to face, and remember for their entire life if they survived. The Things They Carried goes into detail about the relentless days they spent in Vietnam at War by telling stories of a platoon that the author was in. These stories explain the life changing burdens soldiers have to carry at war and for their entire lives.

In the world of Tim O’Brien story there are many individuals who come from different walks of life. Many affected by their culture, geography, surroundings, and circumstances they have each been exposed too. In “The Things They Carried,” the characters demonstrate the challenges and struggles they face and how they attempt to conceal it inside them. In today’s world this short story can be related to the responsibilities, challenges, and struggles individuals face internally from one day to the next.

Throughout the story “The Things They Carried” the author Tim O’Brien constantly teeter tots on the concept of what is the truth. He contemplates whether it is possible to tell a true war story. Tim creates a story that makes the reader puzzle over what they can perceive as the truth and what is not. I believe that Tim wrote this story to expand upon the purpose of storytelling and to express this thought through a war story. When diving into the chapters “Notes” and “Speaking of Courage” Tim makes a clever use of literature to create a seamless reading that expands the way we understand the content. The seamless fit of the two chapters complement each other and construct a powerful message between them.

A traumatic event occurs when a person is in a situation where there is a risk of harm or danger to themselves or other people. Situations like this are usually frightening or cause a lot of stress. In such situations, people feel helpless. We all cope with these traumas in different ways, in the protagonist’s case, he writes about it. Tim O’Brien expresses a candid tone in the passage corresponding to Lavender’s death from fictional novel, The Things They Carried using specific rhetorical strategies in order to create a relatable dilemma with how often times horrific stories are unintentionally skewed.

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.