Self-Discovery In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

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After years of searching, I came to the conclusion that it was never going to happen to me – I would never experience that magical moment of reading a book, seeing a piece of artwork, or even listening to a song and it becoming this miraculous, life-altering thing. I desperately wanted to have that moment of self-realization and discovery that reveals something important about myself as a person, but it never happened; it still hasn’t. I realized that reading a book (or any other “text” for that matter) and expecting it to redirect the entire course of my life was like waiting for rain in a drought. I was trying to manipulate and force a feeling that simply needed to happen on its own, because one day it was bound to come. Nevertheless, I have luckily stumbled upon texts that made me feel something deep; something close to an epiphany, but not quite. …show more content…

One text in particular, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, had a strong influence on my emotions and moved me to tears with just one page. I try to avoid war stories as often as I can, but this book was a required read for my 20th Century Fiction class. Naturally, the book was painfully detailed and involved a lot of casualties; however, it wasn’t so much the death of the soldiers that triggered a response from me, but rather the graphic abuse and murder of a baby water buffalo. It occurred to me that I had always been affected by an animal dying more so than a human dying, but I had never really questioned why this was the case – until I read The Things They

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