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The things they carried symbolism essay
Symbolism things they carried in the book things they carried
Symbolism things they carried in the book things they carried
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Sherman Alexie once said, “When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.” When humans are faced with struggle, he or she has two options: to cope with what they are faced with or to fall prey to the struggle. In the story, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, the author narrates the experiences the soldiers of the Alpha Company as they traverse through the fields of Vietnam during the Vietnam War. War is traumatic, and it often changes people permanently. The soldiers deal with emotional, mental, and physical trauma more than most people ever have to endure. They encountered death, disease, and destruction on a weekly basis. The men deal with the uncertainty, fear, and death around them in surprisingly tender, humorous, or horrifyingly brutal ways in order to cope with what they have seen. When faced with war, each man reacts in his own way and changes based on the circumstances he stumbles upon.
Throughout the story, Azar along with the other soldiers used humor as form of coping. Jokes are continually made throughout the war in order to remove the reality from the situation and make it less real than it actually is. The jokes covered the fears they carry around. It creates the distance necessary to allow the war to not get to them. Finding things to joke around about helped the soldiers have a sense of purpose and existence even while everything around them was crumbling. According to Tim O’Brien, “They found jokes to tell. They used a hard vocab to contain the terrible softness…. When someone died, it wasn’t quite dying because in a curious way it seemed scripted…”. They choose to mock their experiences rather than face the pain associated with it as shown through their ritual of...
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... how he chooses to take out his pain. The buffalo was the embodiment of his pain, and he needed something to take their pain out on, so he begins to shoot pieces and pieces of the buffalo. According to the narrator, “it wasn’t to kill; it was to hurt… The whole platoon stood there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn’t a great deal of pity for the baby water buffalo.” Their aim was never to kill the buffalo, instead it was to make the buffalo experience the slow and killing pain that all of them had felt since the beginning of the war. A similar incident occurred immediately after Lavender’s death, as the Alpha Company chose to obliterate the town to release the pain brought on by the death of Lavender. In situations such as these, although violence is often not the best choice, it is one of the only ways they are able to move on from tragedy in war.
It’s hard for civilians to see what veterans had to face and still do even after all is said and done. The rhetorical strategies that contribute to Grady’s success in this article is appealing to the reader’s emotions through the story of Jason Poole. Denise Grady’s “Struggling Back From War’s Once Deadly Wounds” acts as an admonition for the American public and government to find a better way to assist troops to land on their feet post-war. Grady informs the reader on the recent problems risen through advancements in medical technology and how it affected the futures of all the troops sent into the Iraq war.
“How nice- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive” (Vonnegut 181).
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.
Denise Grady’s (2006) article sound a strong wake up call for the American government and for the American public to re-evaluate their guiding principles towards war in Iraq and the continued presence of the American soldiers in the Iraqi soil. Grady delineated the enormous damages the war had costs in not only monetary terms but also the future of thousands of promising young and talented men and women sent in the Iraq War; that had no clear benefits to them or the American people.
"Oh man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker. You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like fuckin' Shredded Wheat." I chose to start off my essay with this particular exert from the book because I think that it very much represents the story in itself. Azar said this, after Tim (supposedly) killed a Vietnamese soldier with a hand grenade. It shows that in times of war, how callous men can become. However, callousness varies, whether they chose to be apathetic, like Tim shows us after his grenade episode. Or whether they choose to be more myopic, as shown through Azar's insensitive actions (i.e. the young lady's tragic loss, the puppy, need I say more?). "The things they carried" by Tim O’Brien is a tale, not about war, but rather about war's affect on one's mentality.
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried storytelling mode allows his lectors to empathize with the characters personalities and emotional burdens during the Vietnam of war through the use of many elements of fiction including characterization, war settings, irony of situation, symbolism, and plot but most notably his technique of correlation between the weight of the stuff each soldier carried on them necessary for their survival in battle and the weight of the stuff they carried internally such as their doubts, fears, love and hopes.
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.
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 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.
As inappropriate as it sounds, humor was used in an attempt to cheer up the soldiers. Humor is a way to temporarily relieve the pain or stress of an ongoing issue. Laughter, or even just smiling can have positive effects on the body. O’Brien explains in an interview with Patrick Hicks on why he used humor in his story as part of a coping mechanism. He stated, “It 's very important to me when I 'm writing tragedy to have humor in it, and vice-versa. The world is not uni-dimensional. It 's not all sad or all happy. I remember reading Man 's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl 's book, and Primo Levi on the concentration camps, and even their humor was a way of coping and dealing with the world--it 's called gallows humor. It was rampant in Vietnam (Hicks, 2005).” Being in Vietnam and fighting this whole war was unpleasant, so he used humor in hopes of making things somewhat
When O’Brien first arrives to Vietnam, the men of the platoon show him how the grief of war can be covered up by humor. As the men were patrolling near a village off the South China Sea they suddenly started to encounter sniper fire. The firefight only lasted a few minutes but Lt. Cross decided to order an airstrike on the village anyways. After the strike was over, the platoon proceeded to the smoldering village to find nothing but “…an old man who lay face up near a pigpen at the center of the village. His right arm was gone. At his face there were already many flies and gnats.”(). To many, this image of a destroyed village and the mutilated old man would cause horror and plight. Instead of that normal reaction, “Dave Jensen went over and shook the old man’s hand. “How-dee-doo,” he said.”(). The other men of the platoon also went up to the dead man’s body and shook his hand while adding a comment. This disturbing response the men have to the dead old man isn’t one of disrespect, it is their coping mechanism for realizing what they just did. Because O’Brien was new to Vietnam he had yet to understand why the men were all doing this. He was awestruck by the actions...
The novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is based in Vietnam during the Vietnam War in the 1950’s. Though most of the novel is just a flashback to the Vietnam War, there are some events that occur well after the war. Looking back at their place in time during the Vietnam War, Jimmy Cross and some of his old fellow war vets use some of the objects they carried with them in Vietnam to remember those events that caused their lives to drastically change. The most significant event that changed Jimmy Cross’ life was of watching fellow platoon member Ted Lavender die right next to him. Cross does not go a day in his life without blaming himself for Lavender’s death. Throughout the novel Jimmy is torn between the love of his life, Martha, who does not feel as affectionate towards Cross, and by his actions in the War. In the novel, the author/narrator Tim O’Brien is also a protagonist in the story. He is first presented as a nervous, young, soldier who is in the Alpha Platoon. Because of O’Brien being the author of the novel, he can strongly use imagery to his advantage when he writes of stories he confronted in his point of view. The two main topics of current war and PTSD which are illustrated in the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien can be compared and contrasted with three relevant articles: “Al Qaeda tries to recruit Americans in Syria,” “Ukraine orders Crimea troop withdrawal as Russia seizes naval base,’ and “Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder.”
Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” is the first story in a collection about the Alpha Company, led by First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross during the Vietnam War. The platoon is deployed near Than Khe, an area filled with dense jungle and unrelenting rain where the men must carry or “hump” an unspeakable amount of weight both literal and emotional to survive. The narrator, O’Brien, is one of the soldiers, and he distinguishes one soldier from another with a vivid description of what each one must, and chooses to carry in order to survive war. The seventeen men in this troop are tasked with a search and destroy mission inside tunnel complexes south of Chu Lai. While Lee Strunk is in the tunnels, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross is obsessing over Martha, a girl from back home, and Ted Lavender is taking drugs. Just when Lee Strunk emerges from the tunnels unscathed, Ted Lavender is shot in the head----boom-down--killed, and the men begin to vacillate between morbid fascination and guilt.
The theme of emotional weight and its effect on soldiers in the Vietnam conflict is one that O'Brien tackles. By placing physical items next to intangible things like emotions in a list format, O'Brien forces his reader to acknowledge the weight and effect of both of these things on the person who carries them. Lt. Jimmy Cross' inner fear that he was the cause of Ted Lavender's death was symbolized by Martha's pebble and letters. He felt that when he burned the pictures he was conquering his fear, even though no one can simply burn their emotions away. To a certain extent, these men are defined by the things that they carry, "And for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry," (O'Brien, 16).
One of the worst things about war is the severity of carnage that it bestows upon mankind. Men are killed by the millions in the worst ways imaginable. Bodies are blown apart, limbs are cracked and torn and flesh is melted away from the bone. Dying eyes watch as internal organs are spilled of empty cavities, naked torso are hung in trees and men are forced to run on stumps when their feet are blown off. Along with the horrific deaths that accompany war, the injuries often outnumber dead men. As Paul Baumer witnessed in the hospital, the injuries were terrifying and often led to death. His turmoil is expressed in the lines, “Day after day goes by with pain and fear, groans and death gurgles. Even the death room I no use anymore; it is too small.” The men who make it through the war take with them mental and physical scarification from their experiences.