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Analytic essay of the things they carried
The things they were carrying
Analytic essay of the things they carried
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Deep Concerns In novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien expresses a very personal story of his participation as a soldier in the Vietnam War. The narrator offers different tales in which he shares his thoughts, fears as a war companion, and colleague as well as a former soldier. It reviews O’Brien stories as well as the horrifying events that happened in Vietnam. It also evaluates the quality of O’Brien writing, and focuses on any areas of weaknesses, and inner feelings within the story. The reason why O’Brien narrates stories, is to release his memories from a guilty conscious, and continuously keeping alive the stories of soldiers who were forgotten through the years. Many young men were sent to war, regardless if they did …show more content…
This would make them escape from the Vietnam War, and create a fantasy world where they get serenity. “I remember Mitchell Sanders smiling as he told me that story. Most of it he made up, I’m sure, but even so it gave me a quick truth-goose. Because it’s all relative. You’re pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a paddy, getting your ass delivered to kingdom come, but then for a few second everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few puffy eyeballs- the whole world gets rearranged-and even though you’re pinned down by a war you never felt more at peace. What sticks to memory, often are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end”(Pg. 38-39) The narrator gives us a great example about the emotional baggage most soldiers recollect. Showing how powerful his mind can be on conveying from Hell to Heaven. Even though, he is now living a different life, hell can be present, as soon as he reminisces the war. He gets to reincarnate the story in present day. Lastly the narrator has effectively continue forward, displaying the profound emotional state of mind of a soldier. Clearly knowing his feelings can be deceiving, and doubting the whole world from the true. “The vapors suck you in. You can’t tell where you are,
Before O’Brien was drafted into the army, he had an all American childhood. As talked about “His mother was an elementary school teacher, his father an insurance salesman and sailor in World War II” (O’Brien). He spent his tour of duty from 1969 to 1970 as a foot soldier. He was sent home when he got hit with a shrapnel in a grenade attack. O’Brien says as the narrator, “As a fiction writer, I do not write just about the world we live in, but I also write about the world we ought to live in, and could, which is a world of imagination.” (O’Brien)
Tim O’Brien is a very gifted author, but he is also a veteran of the Vietnam War and fought with the United States in that controversial war. Tim O’Brien was drafted into the Vietnam War in 1968. He served as an infantryman, and obtained the rank of sergeant and won a Purple Heart after being wounded by shrapnel. He was discharged from the Vietnam War in 1970. I believe that O’Brien’s own images and past experiences he encountered in the Vietnam War gave him inspiration to write the story “The Things They Carried.” O’Brien tells the story in third person narrative form about Lt. Jimmy Cross and his platoon of young American men in the Vietnam War. In “The Things They Carried” we can see differences and similarities between the characters by the things they hold close to them.
Neilson, Jim. Warring Fictions: American Literary Culture and the Vietnam War Narrative. Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1998
O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried layering themes on top of themes, but what makes it amazing is the way he presents these themes. Every single one intertwined with another. Burdens. Truth. Death. The soldiers carried their burdens and the death of their friends and enemies, and they live on as storytellers telling their war stories, but can there really be a true war story?
Tim O’Brien is doing the best he can to stay true to the story for his fellow soldiers. Tim O’Brien believed that by writing the story of soldiers in war as he saw it brings some type of justice to soldiers in a war situation.
Of course O’Brien recounts his own experiences during the war, but he also uses metafiction to parallel the relationship between fiction immortality. Not only does he relive his experiences in Vietnam by telling war stories, he examines the mechanics behind writing stories. By paralleling these two aspects, O’Brien produces a novel that exposes the purpose behind his stories, and the relationship between fiction, reality, and the immortality of storytelling. Unlike most war novels, O’Brien’s stories are not written for therapeutic purposes or to convey an image of heroism. He tells the tales in The Things They Carried to recount and preserve his past, and to realize that the results of his experiences made him who he is
In The Things They Carried there are three instances in which the main character and author Tim O’Brien experiences first hand the tragedy of death. During his storytelling O’Brien describes the man he kills, next he describes the first death he witnesses in Vietnam and finally his first experience early in life with the death of Linda. O’Brien tells the reader how he has able to cope and learn with each experience of death. In the book, The Things They Carried O’Brien tells how he copes with death in his own way and how his understanding of death evolves throughout the novel.
In the Novel The Things They Carried it starts of by talking about the things the men carried physically mentally and emotionally. Throughout the book It gives many examples of how they carry emotional things such as guilt. They tell stories to keep their men alive in memory. It explains how O'Brien has coped with war and why he writes the way he does. Throughout the book they talk about the death of their men and some of the places they were assigned to. It talks about
Fighting the Vietnam War dramatically changed the lives of everyone even remotely involved, especially the brave individuals actually fighting amidst the terror. One of the first things concerned when reading these war stories was the detail given in each case. Quotes and other specific pieces of information are given in each occurrence yet these stories were collected in 1981, over ten years following the brutal war. This definitely shows the magnitude of the war’s impact on these servicemen. These men, along with every other individual involved, went through a dramatic experience that will forever haunt their lives. Their minds are filled with scenes of exploding buildings, rape, cold-blooded killing, and bodies that resemble Swiss cheese.
The novel, “The Things They Carried”, is about the experiences of Tim O’Brian and his fellow platoon members during their time fighting in the Vietnam War. They face much adversity that can only be encountered in the horrors of fighting a war. The men experience death of friends, civilians, enemies and at points loss of their rationale. In turn, the soldiers use a spectrum of methods to cope with the hardships of war, dark humor, daydreaming, and violent actions all allow an escape from the horrors of Vietnam that they experience most days.
The Things They Carried represents a compound documentary novel written by a Vietnam veteran, Tim O'Brien, in whose accounts on the Vietnam war one encounters graphical depictions of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Thus, the stories "Speaking of Courage," "The Man I Killed," "How to Tell a True War Story," "Enemies" and "Friends," "Stockings," and "The Sweetheart of The Song Tra Bong "all encompass various examples of PTSD.
The Things They Carried is a collection of stories about the Vietnam War that the author, Tim O’Brien, uses to convey his experiences and feelings about the war. The book is filled with stories about the men of Alpha Company and their lives in Vietnam and afterwards back in the United States. O’Brien captures the reader with graphic descriptions of the war that make one feel as if they were in Vietnam. The characters are unique and the reader feels sadness and compassion for them by the end of the novel. To O’Brien the novel is not only a compilation of stories, but also a release of the fears, sadness, and anger that he has felt because of the Vietnam War.
He wants the readers to be able to feel how he felt and understand how everything happened as he tells the story. He wants to provoke the emotional truth. O’Brien tries to prove that imagination is not completely a bad thing and that it is also a good thing. O’Brien starts to create stories about what could have happened and what he could not do at the war, in addition to the original war story. With the power of imagination, O’Brien is able to talk about something that he could have done but did not do in his past.
but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non existent nose"(27).
“The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.” (96)