Imagination: The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

Surafel Argaw
Professor Mac
English 1102
Sept 24 2014
Imagination is a Killer
In the story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien demonstrates that having a distraction from one’s purpose not only affects the person’s life, way of judgment and the ability to lead, but also the people around them too. This can be a positive driving force for change or a burden for the rest of lives. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross can be a good example for this. He was a leader of a unit of soldiers who had failed to demonstrate his abilities to fulfill his role by assuring his unit’s safety. He was obsessed and daydreaming about a college girl, Martha, who will never love him. As the narrator mentioned in his story, “they were not love letters, but lieutenant

Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack” (1).
Lieutenant Cross was very obsessed with Martha. Even though she doesn’t love him, he used to “spend the last hour of light pretending” (O’Brien 11). “He has two photographs; one is the Kodacolor snapshot signed with love where she stood against the brick wall, and the second one was clipped from the 1968 Mount Sebastian yearbook” (O’Brien 12). He was so sensitive and so dreamy knowing that Martha never loved him back. This tortures him and distracts him from his work. The fact that he prefers a fantasy than heavy reality, costs him the life of one of his unit member.
Lieutenant Cross was unable to balance between his obsession with Martha and his responsibilities for the safety of his units.

This guilt gets more palpable as people from his unit die. It gets even worse and acute when Ted Lavender gets killed. Right before lavender got killed, he was delusioning about Martha and the photographs and letters he got from her. The narrator also mentioned, how the unit and Lieutenant Cross felt after lavender died. “Kiowa explained how Lavender died, Lieutenant Cross found himself trembling…. He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war” (O’Brien

16).
Not only in their initials had Lieutenant Cross linked to Christ with the idea of the cross. Christ was crucified for the sake of his fellow men, and Cross also sacrificed his obsession for the safety of his men. He burns Martha’s letters and the two photographs.” On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha's letters. Then he burned the two photographs” (O’Brien 16). He gave up on all distractions by destroying his connection to the past and punished himself for his failure in war.
Martha on the other hand, holds herself physicaly and emotionally is because, she has a secret that she keeps. Possibly she has been raped. She hindered him from having physical contact with her. Even the narrator said, “A dark theater, he remembered, and the movie was Bonnie and Clyde, and Martha wore a tweed skirt, and during the final scene, when he touched her knee, she turned and looked at him in a sad, sober way that made him pull his hand back….” (O’Brien 12). In the narrator’s perspective this might be the closest he physically ever gets besides the goodnight kiss on the stairs. But still she had this sad and sober reaction on her face which made Lieutenant Cross pull his hand back.
Martha is a connection to home for Lieutenant Cross. She represents home, the beauty of the world, everything soft and tender. But this contrasts with the life he is living now, which is super muscular, where everything is harsh and difficult. The only place he gets softness and tenderness is from the idea of Martha which was his way of escape from this harsh and difficult world. When he burns these letters from Martha, he is making a huge sacrifice because he is cutting himself off from his home and his fantasy. This will lead him to be a better leader, because he won’t be an emotional soldier anymore. This might be a good thing for a soldier but is it a good thing for human being? What will happen when he returns home? Will he be emotionally ready to enter the civilian world? Will he be able to build relationships and live a healthy life? He is cutting off a huge portion of himself in order to become this super soldier he thinks he needs to be.
To sum up when we look at this short story, it’s tempting to say, Gosh!!

This Lieutenant Cross does not have it together. He is day dreaming about Martha a lot; he found himself zoning out; he blames himself for the death of one of his soldiers. But on closer inspection, it’s fair to say that he is trying very hard to be a good leader. We are not supposed to judge him; instead we need to empathize. Anyone in this situation would have a hard time staying on alert constantly. Doing everything according to the book, never having some sort of escape or valve to let off some of that pressure is not a behavior of human beings. All of them have a little indulgences, a way to staying psychologically safe in the midst of this horror. He is no different from the rest of the crew, His psychological escape was reading her letters and staring at her

pictures.