Similarities Between The Things They Carried And Araby

Love and Reality in
“The Things They Carried” and “Araby”
Within Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” and James Joyce’s “Araby,” the two main protagonists share a similar internal struggle and conflict, despite being worlds apart in circumstances. O’Brien and Joyce both perfectly articulate the complete infatuation of First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and “Araby’s” unnamed narrator with each of their respective loves. Even being separated by largely different writing styles, the reader follows the two with equal intrigue and wonder at the depth of their fascination, only to find them both within a moment of epiphany, where they realize the profound misfortune of their love. Amidst two largely different, almost opposite, stories these two young

men experience near-identical character arcs centered around young love and the soberness left in its wake.
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, is a young man, dreamer, and soldier leading a platoon during the Vietnam war. He heads a patrol made up of, Henry Dobins, Dave Jensen, Ted Lavender, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Kiowa, and a few others. The writing details down to the ounce the amount of hardships and struggles the platoon has to carry with long lists like “the weapon weighed 7.5 pounds… M-79 grenade-launcher, 5,9 pounds… fragmentation grenades – 14 ounces each” (597-598). This weight along with many other descriptions and background knowledge of the Vietnam War provides a profound sense of danger, hopelessness, and violence in which Cross floats upon. Quite in contrast with the traumatizing setting and wartime conflict, “Araby” follows a young unnamed narrator throughout the streets of Dublin. They live on “North Richmand Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free” (538). Between the events of the story, the narrator’s humdrum and idle school life provide the backdrop for his “exotic love” and his need to attend the supposedly fantastical bazaar. This serene, yet mundane urban life is a near contradiction to the setting portrayed in “The Things They Carry”.
Despite these two largely contrasted situations, both young men share a largely similar emotional infatuation and story arc. Both Cross and the unnamed narrator, have become enamored with their respective lovers, Martha and Manga’s sister. Martha, Cross’ lover, is described to be a “virgin, he was almost sure. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully” (596). Cross describes her peaceful, serene life back at home in contrast to his current predicament. The narrator’s lover is a sister to one of his friends who’s “dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side” (539). To him, she was an object of great wonder and romance, one of which the young boy had yet to experience.
Within both love affairs, the two protagonists share a sort of separation from their lover which only continues to enthrall them. Cross and Martha are physically separated by miles of land and ocean. In addition, Cross always refers pessimistically to Martha, noting how her use of “Love” seemed “only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant” (396). He reiterates this pessimism throughout the story using words such as sad, sober, embarrassing, slow, and oppressive to describe the real-life interactions between the two. It becomes painfully aware that Cross is deeply and madly in love with Martha, a favor of which she does not seem to return. More so Cross seems fascinated with the idea of Martha, whether she is a virgin or not and what it would be like to walk on the beach with her, then the real personality and interactions had with Martha.
A similar degree of separation is shown in the narrator’s interactions with his lover.

He mentions how he would habitually watch her door in the mornings and follow her until he had to go his separate way to school. Despite this, “I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words” (539). This shows the boy’s youth and relative lack of experience with any sort of true love. Rather, like Cross, he is head over heels for the appearance, the idea, and the temptation of Mangan’s sister, then any true relationship established between the two. Having almost no actual interaction between the two, the narrator is rather surged forward via “foolish blood” and “confused adoration” so often exhibited in younger men (539). Even when this silence between the two was broken, the narrator seemed shell-shocked and barely able to hold of the “innumerable follies [that] lay waste my waking and sleeping thoughts”

(540).
Additionally, at the end of both stories, the Cross and the unnamed narrator have an epiphany in which they wake up to their lustful and excessive fantasies via an incident, to no fault of their own.

In “The Things They Carried,” Lee Strunk is set to investigating a tunnel while the others waited up top. Cross watches over the men, “but he was not there. He was buried” with thoughts of Martha (600). He wakes up from this glassy-eyed state to Ted Lavender being shot straight through the head. Both Lavender and Cross drop like cement, each in their own respects. Cross immediately feels great remorse sorrow, for “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” (602). It’s one challenging thing to watch someone die, it’s even worse to have someone die on your watch, and it’s absolutely horrid to have someone die since you were slacking off. One of the worst possible forms of guilt shakes Cross to the very core. This literal and figurative gunshot suddenly makes Cross realize the foolishness of his obsession. He burns the letters and pictures from Martha symbolically but only further realizes that he “couldn’t burn the blame” (606). He wakes up to the true world he’s living in, takes in the war around him, and starts fresh, anew, ready to carry the weight of his

charge.
In a similar fashion, the narrator from “Araby” experiences his own epiphany, but rather than the intense gunshot that interrupts Cross’ dreams of a simple life, it was the anticlimax of attending the exotic bazaar that kills his infatuation. Unlike Cross who uses his infatuation to get away from the war, the narrator dreamed of a more epic life. After days spent antagonizing over attending the bazaar, something as simple as his uncle getting home late pushes aside his dreams until the late night. By the time he gets there the narrator finds himself woefully disappointed as he finds most everyone closing shop and the true unexotic nature of the event. When passing by people he “remarked their English accents” in contrast to the exotic nature he had imagined (542). With little money left in his pocket, he felt empty and robbed of the experience which he so fondly looked forward too. In this same moment, he decides to leave without buying anything, recognizing that he is “a creature driven and derived by vanity,” who only lusted after the girl and the bazaar for there seemingly bizarre nature.
In a way, these sudden epiphanies in one’s own follies are paralleled yet contradictory in the two stories. Both show a sudden coming to terms with the effects of their infatuations, but one presents the dream of a normal life being broken by a harsh war and the other, a wish for something more exciting to only be met with a mundane reality.