Truth and Fiction in Obrien's "The Things They Carried" The Viet Nam War has been the most reviled conflict in United States history for many reasons, but it has produced some great literature. For some reason the emotion and depredation of war kindle in some people the ability to express themselves in a way that they may not have been able to do otherwise. Movies of the time period are great, but they are not able to elicit, seeing the extremely limited time crunch, the same images and charge that a well-written book can. In writing of this war, Tim O'Brien put himself and his memories in the forefront of the experiences his characters go through, and his writing is better for it. He produced a great work of art not only because he experienced the war first hand, but because he is able to convey the lives around him in such vivid detail. He writes a group of fictional works that have a great deal of truth mixed in with them. This style of writing and certain aspects of the book are the topics of this reflective paper. It is evident from the first that O'Brien is writing about himself. It is difficult to confuse since he uses his own name, his own place of birth and other true details of his own life to form the narrator of the stories. The truth of the stories is a grounds for understanding the credibility of the author. He is trying to make the reader understand that these are not just random stories that he dreamed up while sitting in front of a type writer or
In the first chapter of the short story, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, every character carries literal figurative things with them. Each item they carry has a significant meaning that helps them keep their mindset straight and their psychological well being intact. The soldiers are in war, most likely they are all scared of death. They need something on their mind to make them happy and also help them survive further on with the war. That is why Tim O’Brien’s piece is a perfect example to read, to learn more about some of the burdens that may be in some soldiers.
The Vietnam War that commenced on November 1, 1955, and ended on April 30, 1975, took the soldiers through a devastating experience. Many lost their lives while others maimed as the war unfolded into its full magnitude. The book Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam by Bernard Edelman presents a series of letters written by the soldiers to their loved ones and families narrating the ordeals and experiences in the Warfield. In the book, Edelman presents the narrations of over 200 letters reflecting the soldiers’ experiences on the battlefield. While the letters were written many decades ago, they hold great significance as they can mirror the periods and the contexts within which they were sent. This paper takes into account five letters from different timelines and analyzes them against the events that occurred in those periods vis a vis their significance. The conclusion will also have a personal opinion and observation regarding the book and its impacts.
Sentence Summary: Daniel Robinson’s essay, “Getting it Right: The Short Fiction of Tim O’Brien” delineates O’Brien’s style of writing which focuses on the aspects of Vietnam, that tell more than the actual facts can. Robinson alludes to the idea that O’Brien’s stories revolve around the emotions and feelings of the characters as they journey through the years of the war, rather than the actual events of the war itself.
As the book by O'Brien The Things They Carried continue plus the short stories from Patriots, it made me think more and more about the purpose of the war and the consequences of the war on soldiers. The war started because of the political disagreements and because of that, people had to go and fight for their country's standpoint. According to the O'Brien book, when he is visiting Vietnam after the war, his daughter asked him: "This whole war, why was everybody so mad at everybody else?" and he answers her, "They weren't mad, exactly. Some people wanted one thing, other people wanted another thing (175)." The whole conflict was based on disagreement, that Vietnam wanted to be independent does not matter who is going to help them to reach
Vietnam, the heart and soul of teenage rebellion to the government for creating a draft that sent over the creative and intelligent youth, was a war that was deemed to get rid of the political idea, communism, which spread as quick as the napalm that blazed over the serene green landscapes. The narrator to the story, Tim O’Brien, repeatedly recounts memories of the war, each with an added detail or an object that carried a significant amount of weight that makes the story seem more factual than what it seems. The soldiers carried loneliness, uncertainty of the truth of war, and the heavy burden of physical and emotion weight; Tim O'Brien uses war related imagery to symbolize the vim of storytelling in his book “The Things They Carried”.
I really like your point about the way how we remember and how we interpret history. I think in the context of the war the way, how the stories are told, is influenced by the subjective view of soldiers. Most of the soldiers in Vietnam were really young and the war is traumatic in itself and it influenced their perception of some situations. As O'Brien describe in his book The Things They Carried, the death of Curt Lemon, how he does not remember if it was true or not. "In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen (O'Brien, 67)." However, even the description of the stories is not exactly true, the war changed their lives significantly and what happened them in Vietnam is something
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a fictional book consisting of different stories from Vietnam war. Tim O’Brien was trying to convey the real perspectives of the war to his readers by telling facts and stories through his personal memories he got from the war, and how things effect them and their life after the war. In order to express the tension in the war, O’Brien depicts the experience of the soldiers by showing the different ways of expression of male love from these soldiers. Although there are many forms of friendship, some of which may vary from place to place, the friendship in the war is the most unique one. As the definition of Friendship, Friendship is a stronger form of interpersonal bond than an association. The bond between soldiers is more intense and real, and this is also the message that Tim O’Brien shows in his book by using metaphor, details depicting and technique of repetition.
The Vietnam War is a conflict that was extremely polarizing to people in the United States and words such as ‘wasted’ or ‘quagmire’ are negative words associated with the war. In his book A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo provides a personal account of events that he experienced leading up to and during the war as a soldier in the United States Marine Corps. Caputo’s experiences transform his idealistic views of war when he is faced with the realities of combat, and ultimately the events cause him to change his opinion about the necessity of the war.
Another way in which O'Brien blurs fiction and fact is through his narrator's (heretofore referred to as Tim), constant and contradictory claims as to the veracity of his stories. One moment Tim swears that a story is true, such as in the chapter "The Man I Killed," when he speaks so realistically and in such detail, about killing an enemy soldier (THINGS 141), but
Very few novels and short stories have managed to clarify, in any lasting process, the means of the war in Vietnam for America and for the troopers who served there. With ' 'The Things They Carried, ' ' author (Tim O’Brien), captures the war 's pulsing rhythms and trying dangers. However he goes abundant any. By moving on the far side the horror of the fighting to look at with sensitivity and insight the character of affection, courageousness and worry, by questioning the role that imagination plays in serving to make recollections. This paper examines the condition of love, shown through intimacy, separation, fantasy, in constitution with the reality of and a going war.
The short story that will be discussed, evaluated, and analyzed in this paper is a very emotionally and morally challenging short story to read. Michael Meyer, author of the college text The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature, states that the author of How to Tell a True War Story, Tim O’Brien, “was drafted into the Vietnam War and received a Purple Heart” (472). His experiences from the Vietnam War have stayed with him, and he writes about them in this short story. The purpose of this literary analysis is to critically analyze this short story by explaining O’Brien’s writing techniques, by discussing his intended message and how it is displayed, by providing my own reaction,
According to Freud, ‘the mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water’ . Through the psychological lens that looks at the submerged part of the ‘iceberg’, one understands that repressed fear and trauma never cease to exist in the war participants’ lives. The novels present to readers not only the gruesomeness in Vietnam’s combat zones, but also the internal battle that the soldiers and veterans keep fighting days, months and years after the immediate traumatic experience. To them, the war indeed never ends.
It can be hard to fully comprehend the effects the Vietnam War had on not just the veterans, but the nation as a whole. The violent battles and acts of war became all too common during the long years of the conflict. The war warped the soldiers and civilians characters and desensitized their mentalities to the cruelty seen on the battlefield. Bao Ninh and Tim O’Brien, both veterans of the war, narrate their experiences of the war and use the loss of love as a metaphor for the detrimental effects of the years of fighting.
My fascination with the Vietnam War began when I went on holidays and crawled into the tunnels tight enough to make even a small eight year old claustrophobic. I wondered how adults survived in the war by using this tunnels. This personally influenced my perspective on the Vietnam War and marked my interest in this piece of history. In my Preliminary HSC Advanced English classes I was told to choose a political perspective in poetry. I chose Levertov, who wrote about the effects of the Vietnam War on people. In my Extension One English classes I learnt about literature as a representation of the author’s culture. These two main ideas and childhood interest in the Vietnam War became the starting point for my Major Work.
Forty-two years has passed since the Fall of Saigon 1975, yet still the Vietnam War and its aftermath are not to be forgotten. The first of the wars to be publically broadcasted earned the Vietnam War the name “Television War.” Despite the public’s division on the war, young men filled with patriotism and purpose went off to war. These men were unsure and unskilled to survive and fight in the jungles of Vietnam. Soon, the war proved to be more than a physical battle, but one of mental endurance as well. Novels such as, Falling Through the Earth by Danielle Trussoni and Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes allow for a different interpretation of the war. The novels expose the world of the characters, where readers gain an understanding of the characters’