Most stories about war show the glory of war and heroism of soldiers. According to OED, war is “a state of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within a nation or state”. But, what’s the definition about the stage of confusions in the soldier’s mind? A conflict between two nations or states can be resolved in a particular amount of time but can an experience from a person’s mind can ever be forgotten, can a person ever be able to resolve his own conflict: his fight with his emotions, changes, and his own mind? Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a powerful combination of fact and fiction; through description and imagination, O’Brien allows the reader to feel a soldier's hardships in the war and emotional state. His purpose of the book is to tell a war story, which isn’t true, doesn’t have a teaching, cannot be believed, and most of all, which never has an ending & not about the Vietnam War. In his fiction, each man’s physical burden reflects on to his emotional burden caused by different changes in his life throughout the war time. In The Things They Carried, O’Brien wants to convey the emotional experience of soldiers without concern for objective reality.
But, why does this change occur? Why does change that can be clearly seen by others, so important to O’Brien? He uses short sentences and consistent repetition of different terms or usage of same format to drag us into his writing, making us eager for the next event that the following story will tell us- although all the stories in The Things They Carried do not go in order to which the events actually happened, we as readers do not even know if those events actually happened or not; still, we feel the chronological order of changes that...
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...otional 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" (“Carried” 23). O’Brien showed the effect that emotional longings have on one’s thoughts & feelings. Though he tells that his novel is about story-truth, which is not about war and do not have a moral; but one can understand that O’Brien’s fiction is a message against forcing young people into war. By true-made up stories; the author shows the transformation of one’s emotional state through war and its long-lasting impact. O’Brien’s stories prove that seen physical burdens emphasize the unseen emotional burden: physical burden can be expressed in words, but emotional burden, changes that are encouraged by our surroundings cannot be expressed in words- thus they always remain untrue yet true.
Tim O’Brien states in The Things They Carried that “Stories are for joining the past to the future” (36). Early in this novel, O’Brien adds “I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words and watch Kiowa sinking into the deep muck of a shit field, or Curt Lemon hanging in pieces from a tree, and as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening” (31). In this quote O’Brien foreshadows some of the approaching short stories. But the recurring struggle that O’Brien goes through when reliving these awful memories causes him to describe the details in a way you will feel what he has felt. Making the past with the present and the truth blurred with the fiction. His purpose, is to write about his struggle to write these war stories, including his obsession to continue to write them. O’Brien uses himself to illustrate the emotional and physical weight of his obsession to write war stories about Vietnam.
This book review praises the format that O’Brien used in his novel, The Things They Carried and commends the cohesion it has with the realities of war. Jones, a writer for Newsweek comments that O’Brien does not romanticise the death of his fellow soldiers making their deaths seem more heroic than what they actually were. Jones acknowledges that it was a messy war, so the format of the stories being told about it should reflect that. O’Brien outlines the realities of war in this novel, and does not sugar coat it at all.
One of the main points in The Things They Carry, by Tim O’Brien, is that war changes people. This is evident in the behavior of Norman Bowker, Bob “Rat” Kiley, and the character Tim O’Brien. They each started out as kind young men but near the end had become very distraught. These men each shared many experiences but these experiences affected each one differently.
Another unique aspect to this book is the constant change in point of view. This change in point of view emphasizes the disorder associated with war. At some points during the book, it is a first person point of view, and at other times it changes to an outside third person point of view. In the first chapter of the book, “The Things They Carried,” O’Brien writes, “The things they carried were largely determined by necessity (2).
By allowing the reader the "[privilege of] the soldiers experience" (Chattarji) it shows how difficult it is to get rid of the weight as begins to define you and the more it becomes a part of a person the harder it is to remove an aspect of yourself. In his repetition, O'Brien wants to give readers a deeper meaning into the everyday struggles of soldiers. He portrays the ways that soldiers were effected in the war and focused on the burdens that developed. O'Brien highlights how war changes those involved as "[the individual dreams of soldiers rise and fall and] their hopes riddled by disillusionment, their fantasies broken by shrapnel edged realities" (Timmeran). Wartime altered soldier’s perception and caused them to develop these emotional and physical weights that followed them for years. When many solider returned they were now stuck with daily burdens that had started since the day they landed in Vietnam. Constantly, these soldiers endured the long lasting results of participating in the war and unable to escape or forget the weight that they endure. "The Things They Carried" serves as a constant reminder to readers about the true realities of soldiers and the impact of war. How soldiers are not stable as they return home because of these weights that have become a part of them and how simple acts such as carrying around a weapon has now manifested itself into an emotional burden that will not leave. Often the realities of being a soldier are not portrayed accurately but O'Brien attempts to put into perspective what it really is like to go through warfare by drawing on his own experiences as a foot
In “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien portrays a captivating message of responsibility to his readers. Its moral explains how we sometimes let ourselves “out” of our problems, because we would like to be somewhere pleasant. The excerpt retrospect’s the war in Vietnam and illustrates the mentality and life of the foot soldiers that fought and died there. By establishing what each character carried in a literal, spiritual, and mental form, the reader can understand what the men were about. By doing so, O’Brien creates a world where reality and imagination meet and are in competition with each other.
...O'Brien goes beyond the telling of war stories in The Things They Carried to say something larger about the art and purpose of story-telling. Contrasting truth and fiction, O'Brien shows that the truth cannot always communicate human emotion. O'Brien's personal guilt at seeing a man die from a grenade blast is real, and must be communicated as such in a story. Norman Bowker's guilt at seeing Kiowa sink into the muck leaves him with a sense of direct personal failure. By incorporating this sense of failure into fictional events, O'Brien is able to communicate the true human emotion behind the story, rather than just the facts. Above and beyond a simple set of war stories, The Things They Carried reduces fiction to the very heart of why stories are told the way they are.
The truth behind stories is not always what happened, with each person 's perspective is where their truth lies. In the beginning of the novel, you start to think that it is going to be the same old war stories you read in the past, but it changes direction early. It is not about how the hero saves the day, but how each experience is different and how it stays with you. From his story about Martha, to how he killed a man, each one is so different, but has its own meaning that makes people who have not been in war, understand what it is like. Tim O’Brien can tell a fake story and make you believe it with no doubt in your mind. He does this throughout the novel. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien distinguishes truth from fantasy and the
Written by author Tim O’Brien after his own experience in Vietnam, “The Things They Carried” is a short story that introduces the reader to the experiences of soldiers away at war. O’Brien uses potent metaphors with a third person narrator to shape each character. In doing so, the reader is able to sympathize with the internal and external struggles the men endure. These symbolic comparisons often give even the smallest details great literary weight, due to their dual meanings. The symbolism in “The Things They Carried” guides the reader through the complex development of characters by establishing their humanity during the inhumane circumstance of war, articulating what the men need for emotional and spiritual survival, and by revealing the character’s psychological burdens.
The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger once said “Perjor est bello timor ipse belli”, which translates to: “the dread of war is worse than war itself”. With this quote, Seneca identifies that war has both its physical and mental tolls on its participants. The psychological and emotional scars of war do much more damage to a solider than the actual physical battles. Tim O’ Brien repeats this idea many years later in his novel “The Things They Carried”, by describing how emotional burdens outweigh the physical loads that those in war must endure. What keeps them alive is the hope that they may one day return home to their loved ones. Yet, the weight of these intangible “items” such as “grief, terror, love, longing” overshadow the physical load they must endure since they are not easily cast away.
O’Brien’s unique verisimilitude writing style fills the novel with deep meaning and emotion. Analyzing the novel through a psychological lens only adds to its allure. Understanding why characters act the way they do helps bring this novel to life. The reader begins to empathize with the characters. Every day, the soldiers’ lives hang in the balance. How these soldiers react to life-threatening situations will inspire the reader. Life has an expiration date. Reading about people who are held captive by their minds and who die in the name of war, will inspire the reader to live everyday as if they are currently in the
In The Things They Carried, an engaging novel of war, author Tim O’Brien shares the unique warfare experience of the Alpha Company, an assembly of American military men that set off to fight for their country in the gruesome Vietnam War. Within the novel, the author O’Brien uses the character Tim O’Brien to narrate and remark on his own experience as well as the experiences of his fellow soldiers in the Alpha Company. Throughout the story, O’Brien gives the reader a raw perspective of the Alpha Company’s military life in Vietnam. He sheds light on both the tangible and intangible things a soldier must bear as he trudges along the battlefield in hope for freedom from war and bloodshed. As the narrator, O’Brien displayed a broad imagination, retentive memory, and detailed descriptions of his past as well as present situations. 5. The author successfully uses rhetoric devices such as imagery, personification, and repetition of O’Brien to provoke deep thought and allow the reader to see and understand the burden of the war through the eyes of Tim O’Brien and his soldiers.
In “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien brings to light the effects of war on soldiers, both physically and psychologically. The title of the story would lead the reader to believe the story is only about the provisions and apparatus a soldier would physically carry into war. After reading the entire story, it becomes evident that there are many burdens seen and unseen that soldiers face during times of war.
The narrator in “The Things They Carried” deals with the subjective conditions of war. Throughout the story, straining emotions often brought O’Brien’s teams emotions, especially after a death, causes a “crying jag” with a “heavy-duty hurt” (O’Brien 1185). The fury of emotion associated with death begins to erode the sharp minds of the soldiers and become mentally effective. After an event of large magnitude, it still began to take its toll on the protagonist as they often “carried all the emotional baggage of men who might dies” during the war (O’Brien 1187). The travesties that occurred with the brutality of war did not subside and began to affect those involved in a deeply emotional way. The multitude of disastrous happenings influenced the narrator to develop a psychological handicap to death by being “afraid of dying” although being “even more afraid to show it” (O’Brien 1187). The burden caused by the war creates fear inside the protagonist’s mind, yet if he were to display his sense of distress it would cause a deeper fear for those around him, thus making the thought of exposing the fear even more frightening. The emotional battle taken place in the psyche of the narrator is repressed directly by the war. The protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is also faced with the task of coping with mental
In “The Things They Carried” Tim O’Brien uses this story as a coping mechanism; to tell part of his stories and others that are fiction from the Vietnamese War. This is shown by using a fictions character’s voice, deeper meaning in what soldier’s carried, motivation in decision making, telling a war story, becoming a new person and the outcome of a war in one person. Tim O’ Brien uses a psychological approach to tell his sorrows, and some happiness from his stories from the war. Each part, each story is supposed to represent a deeper meaning on how O’Brien dealt, and will deal with his past. In war, a way to discover and to invent new ways to release oneself from the pressure of it, O’ Brien’s writing is all about it; this stories will makes the reader understand his burden.