Summary Of Ted Lavender's Death

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In the chapter "The Lives of the Dead" in The Things They Carried, author Tim O'Brian suggests that reminiscing about the deceased in our stories and dreams enables us to ignore our inevitable mortality. He shows this when the soldiers tell each other stories after Lavender's death and when O'Brian himself dreams of Linda following her death. Dreaming of or telling stories about those who have passed away helps us disregard the certainty of death. In "The Lives of the Dead," O'Brian briefly touches on the topic of Ted Lavender's death. He states how following Lavender's assassination, Mitchell Sanders started talking to the dead body. Someone in the crew decided to imitate Lavender's voice, so Sander's conversation turned into a small story. …show more content…

Later on in the chapter, O'Brian reveals a personal experience where he himself used stories to cope with the death of a good friend. He discusses the story of Linda, his childhood crush who died from a brain tumor when both she and O'Brian were children. He states how he came up with his own stories and dreams about Linda to make it seem like she was not dead. O'Brian explains his views on these stories: "My dreams had become a secret meeting place, and in the weeks after she died I couldn't wait to fall asleep at night . . . I didn't want to lose Linda. She was dead, I understood that. After all, I'd seen her body. And yet even as a nine year old, I had begun to practice the magic of stories" (O'Brian 231). During this flashback, O'Brian realizes even he created his own stories to cope with the loss of someone he truly cared about. Linda's passing was so sudden and O'Brian was so young that he was not completely sure what to make of the tragedy. He knew that Linda was dead—he "understood that"—and yet he still refused to let her go. In order to keep Linda alive, O'Brian turned to the "magic of stories". Like I previously stated, stories and dreams serve as a bridge between the

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