Jimmy Cross In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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In ‘The Things They Carried’ O'Brien explains war memoir and a writer's autobiography where he remembers his experience and describes it with Jimmy cross as the main character. The first Lieutenant Cross is dyeing inside to find out the truth he ‘humps’ letters that are written Martha, “a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey, a poet and a virgin and uninvolved”, which he folds in a plastic and puts them at the bottom of his rucksack. Every day, he would return to the letters in his ‘rucksack’ and spend an hour going through the letters while his imagination grew wild. The letters were not romantic, he kept on kissing the papers hoping she had done that too. Cross expresses a deep desire to know inside out the writer of these letters, but he has a huge load of responsibilities to lead his team and fight for them. Losing one of his team members Lavender, “Dead weight” puns O’Brien, makes him shift his focus from Martha which greatly affects him. He ends up burning the letters which he later regrets those actions. Occasionally, when everything else fails his mind wanders back to his thoughts about Martha. At this moment he gets caught up between …show more content…

All he could do was dig using his ‘entrenching tool’ to slash while feeling love and hate. Cross regrets the death of Lavender, ‘Lavender is one of the only soldiers who dies in combat’ and develops an insecurity of his image that might be portrayed by the narrator O’Brien. He remembers Lavender's death with a photo ‘clipped from the 1968 Mount Sebastian yearbook’, of Martha playing volleyball that he used to look during that time. O’Brien is surprised by the photo and inquiries about it. Cross reminisces on the experiences he has had with Martha. he explains it all to O’Brien pointing out the difficult experience he had with Martha trying to talk to her. Martha finally gave Cross another copy of that photo and asked him not to lose

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