Intangible Items In The Things They Carried, By Tim O Brien

Going into a war leaves a physical and emotional mark on a person. Each person carries the weight of the war differently. Those who carry the war emotionally are effected morally compared to those who physically carry it. People possess tangible items and intangible items that both have significance on how a person mentally reacts in different situations. In The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, we see how the intangible items have more of a prominent impact on the character’s life. This directly relates to today’s world and all the war we have encountered first hand. The direct impact from the indiscernible items has a more lasting and never changing outcome comparatively.
In The Things They Carried, the first prominent idea is every

character carries pain. Pain can be both physical and mental. In this situation, the pain is a mental issue. “Boom. Down. Nothing else. It was a bright morning in mid-April. Lieutenant Cross felt the pain. He blamed himself” (O’Brien, BOOK). Pain is defined as “acute mental or emotional distress or suffering” (Pain, Merriam-Webster). In everyday life, we see pain in all types of forms, but in this story, we very prominently see the idea of mental struggle. The reader can easily see the pain is not because of the items they carry, it is from the burdens they take upon their shoulders. The people of the United States have put the weight of the world on the soldiers for numerous life times. It is easy to for people to get caught up in the moment of allowing other people to do the hard work. In the short story, it is very clearly seen that mental pain made an appearance in these soldier’s lives.
Love, can build and destroy lives. Tim O’Brien made it a necessity to talk about the lack and presence of love during this time. “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, BOOK), causing mass amounts of pain not only for the narrator, but for the reader too. Love is not something a person can physically touch. In some situations, the reader can avidly see that the characters are not losing because they love, but rather they are losing what they love. “The Things They Carried explicitly examines the dangers of intense self-absorption” (Clarke, 132) proving that not only can feeling love be the cause of their problems, but what they love too. While not all the problems that the men experienced are a result from love, they do cause a slight issue for them. After the men experienced the death of one of their own. Cross specifically made the vow to never love again. Love is wonderful when it is not harmful,
“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. It went on for a long while. In part, he was grieving for Ted Lavender, but mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she belonged to another world, which was not quite real, and because she was a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey, a poet and a virgin and uninvolved, and because he realized she did not love him and never would” (O’Brien, BOOK).
A man’s worst fear is losing his pride and reputation. A reputation means everything to a man, “They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing” (O’Brien, BOOK). Each intangible item has the weight of its own accord. A man who is afraid to lose his pride for something he believes in is not a man.
“…The author’s creation of characters such as Kiowa, Norman Bowker, and Tim O’Brien as protagonist has successfully altered the conventional interpretation of masculinity; assuaged the damage inflicted on those accused of cowardice… applying it to the everyday soldier in Vietnam and other modern wars…” (Mahajani, 255),
proving that men will protect their pride and reputation over everything. The weight and stress that they already carry is heavy in its own way. Putting another object to stress about on their shoulders only makes the situation worse, because this is a weight they cannot eliminate.
While the men are afraid to lose their pride and they lock their emotions away, they end up carrying them.

Emotional weight is a splurge of things. All people carry the weight of stress, but on their own accords. “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing…they had tangible weight” (O’Brien, BOOK). All of these different emotions produce a different, more lasting weight. Weight is described as “an attachment with importance or value of an object” (Weight, Merriam-Webster). A reader can connect this to story line of emotional weight directly to today’s men in war. Emotions can cause the brain to overcompensate for other actions. Since there is no direct tie to PTSD, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, in the story we cannot make a direct correlation to it in real life. “PTSD is a trauma and stress related disorder that may develop after exposure to an event or ordeal in which death, severe physical harm or violence occurred or was threatened” (Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder), which is very evidently seen in The Things They Carried. After they experienced the death of Ted Lavender, it only makes logical sense for there to be at least an underlying form of PTSD. Emotion is a very broad way to classify the intangible items the men carry, but it makes sense seeing that not all men carry each emotion

equally.
The last and most important item they carry, is their morals.

Following your morals is one form of choosing a path. In The Things They Carried, the narrator tells the reader what the characters believed in, “I was superstitious; I believed in the odds with the same passion that my friend Kiowa had once believed in Jesus Christ, or the way Mitchell Sanders believed in the power of morals” (O’Brien, BOOK). Morals are usually gained from experiences that the person has gone through. While the men in this story each came from a different background, they all carry some of the same morals. People live by a “moral code” or a set of rules that they maintain for themselves. In this short story, the men may have started out with certain morals, but they changed as it progressed. The weight of their morals became more significant because of the experiences they

had.
The Things They Carried is a short story of a man and his unit. The reader can see the obvious weight of the world that the men carry in this story. In real time, people place this same weight and stress on men in war today. Tim O’Brien, a man who participated in military service from 1968 to 1970, gives the people a real-life perspective of war (William Timothy O’Brien). As he tells his story from his experience, the reader can see that the physical weight was extremely demanding on the men. What they truly see though is the weight of the intangible objects the men are forced to carry. In today’s world those who serve still face the same issues these men did. Weight is all in the perspective of how the person is taking the load. In the story, they took the load with stride in the beginning, but it got progressively harder. Physical burdens are hard to handle but those of emotions leave a more prominent mark on the men. “Even now, I'll admit, the story makes me squirm. For more than twenty years I've had to live with it, feeling the shame, trying to push it away, and so by this act of remembrance, by putting the facts down on paper, I'm hoping to relieve at least some of the pressure on my dreams. Still, it's a hard story to tell” (O’Brien, 172 ON THE RAINY RIVER). Tim O’Brien put a significant amount of emphasis on the weight of each object, but he also made it clear that the objects that cannot be weighed are heavier than those that can, leaving a mark on all these men.