Hallucinations In The Things They Carried

Stress is very dangerous and can cause severe side effects like hallucinations or even death. For instance, the loss of someone, whether it be another person or one's own self, has the possibility of putting extreme stress on a person. Although there are some healthy ways to relieve this, there are more ways that harm instead of help. One of those ways are hallucinations or vivid dreams that warp the mind. In the stories we have read, two characters especially have this side effect, the Misfit from “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” (Flannery O’Connor) and Jimmy Cross from “The Things They Carried” (Tim O’Brien). They share similarities in the sense that the “dreams” are to cope with the loss of someone and not face real-world problems for a while

but, in Jimmy’s case he tries to get rid of them.
Jimmy is like the Misfit because after these events happen he also loses himself and has “dreams” due to the stress from losing himself, however, unlike the Misfit, he tries to get rid of them rather than keep them.

Jimmy blames the death of Ted on his daydreams and views that if he were a better leader then it wouldn’t have happened. This results in Jimmy deciding on letting the thought of Martha go because he views her as a distraction “He was now determined to perform his duties firmly and without negligence.” (O’Brien 125). The Misfit, on the other hand, has these delusions and decides to keep them as a means to not blame himself, “I call myself the Misfit because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.” (O’Connor 192). Jimmy did not just lose one of his men he lost someone else that was important,

himself.
Granted the Misfit’s visions are to cope with the loss of who he once was, Jimmy’s visions are to help him cope with the stress of losing of Ted Lavender. After Ted is killed Jimmy is hit hard with this fact and is sent into a fit of self-hate and shame “He used his entrenching tool like an ax, slashing, feeling both love and hate, and then later, when it was full dark, he sat at the bottom of his foxhole and wept.” (O’Brien 121). Which caused something to click in his mind that made him realize that if he were a better leader then this might not have happened. This caused him to take full responsibility for what happened and decide that from that point forward he was going to start acting like a leader without the distractions of daydreams “He was now determined to perform his duties firmly and without negligence.” (O’Brien 125). To do this however he had to learn how to come back to reality and face the problems there.
Although these “dreams” can help people to block out the loss of oneself or another person they can also make the person it can cause them to block out the whole world entirely.

For Jimmy and the Misfit, these hallucinations allow both of them not to face the real world problems. With Jimmy’s he is able to forget that he is in the heart of a war and that he had to leave the girl that he adored “he would slip into daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha.”(O’Brien 117). Then the Misfit thinks that he is like Jesus and uses that to justify why he thinks he shouldn’t get punished “It was the same case with Him as it was with me except He hadn’t committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had papers on me. Of course they never shown me my papers.” (O’Connor

192).
Granted they have some differences Jimmy’s and the Misfit’s “dreams” are actually quite similar. They both were used as means of escaping reality and letting them cope with the stress caused by losing who they once were. Thus meaning that upon reaching a certain threshold of stress one will start to hallucinate.