Humor In The Things They Carried

It is crazy to hear about all these mass shootings on television. There have been so many, including the most recent, at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, all over Paris, and now at the Inland Regional Center for disabled people in San Bernardino, California. Mass shootings are always a top priority of the news, so everybody gets to hear about it. Many of the survivors, who lost a friend, loved one, or co-worker to the shooting, or in recovery from being shot themselves are scarred for typically a lifetime. The people affected need a way to cope effectively during the aftermath. In “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien puts coping mechanisms into context and how they were essential during and after the Vietnam War. His novel depicts that the soldiers displaced themselves through keepsakes, the soldiers were brought together through companionship, and used humor as coping mechanisms.

O’Brien demonstrates that keepsakes were a coping mechanism during the war. The keepsakes were the miscellaneous items they

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