Dwight D. Eisenhower once stated, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, it’s stupidity”. In the novel The things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, he tells short stories about his experience over in Vietnam. O’Brien tells the story of how he was drafted to Vietnam, and stories about life and death. The book was written nearly 20 years after the war was over, and the stories told were from his memory. For that reason, the book is nonlinear since he was not able to remember everything. Tim O’Brien expresses the two themes of storytelling/memory and shame/guilt effectively together. In the chapter “The Ghost Soldiers” O’Brien expresses the theme of storytelling/memory. O’Brien recounts the two times he was shot throughout the war. The first time he was shot, the medic helped him, but the second time he got shot, a new medic joined the platoon and ended up …show more content…
Ever since they they changed their schedule, Rat Kiley just was not himself and could not adjust. One day he just could not handle it anymore and shot off one of his feet because of it. “He couldn't stop talking. Wacky talk too” (O’Brien 209). Kiley did not know how to adjust, so he found out talking about everything and anything was his way to adjust. Kiley recounted all of the memories of the injuries and wounds he encountered throughout the war and was not able to shake the images. “It was a sad thing to watch. Definitely not the old Rat Kiley…” (O’Brien 210). Now we get to the viewpoint of O’Brien and the other soldiers, they knew Kiley was no longer himself. O’Brien is able to relook and remember exactly what happened to Kiley. Both Kiley and O’Brien remember stories from the war. Kiley being the farces and wounds, and O’Brien being the change in
In the book “The Things They Carried”, O’Brien uses imagery, figurative language and repetition to convey his message. O’Brien’s purpose for story telling, is to clear his conscience of war and to tell the stories of soldiers who were forgotten by society. Many young men were sent to war, despite opposing it. They believed it was “wrong” to be sent to their deaths. Sadly, no one realizes a person’s significance until they die. Only remembering how they lived rather than acknowledging their existence when they were alive.
"War is hell . . . war is mystery terror and adventure and courage and discovery and despair and . . . war is nasty (80)." When it all happened it was not like "a movie you aren't a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait (211)." O'Brien and the rest of the solders were just ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations. They needed to tell blatant lies" to "bring the body and soul back together (239)." They needed to eliminate the reality of death. As ordinary people they were not capable of dealing with the engulfing realities of death and war therefore they needed to create coping skills. O'Brien approaches the loss of his childhood friend, Linda, in the same way he approaches the loss of his comrades in the war as this is the only way he knows how to deal with death. A skill he learned, and needed, in the Vietnam War.
The things they carried, by Tim O'Brien. "Oh man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker. You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like fuckin' Shredded Wheat." I chose to start off my essay with this particular extract from the book because I think that it very much represents the story in itself. Azar said this, after Tim (supposedly) killed a Vietnamese soldier with a hand grenade. It shows that in times of war, how callous men can become. However, callousness varies, whether they choose to be apathetic, like Tim shows us after his grenade episode.
In the short story, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, each soldier carries many items during times of war and strife, but each necessity differs. This short story depicts what each soldier carries mentally, physically, and emotionally on his shoulders as long, fatiguing weeks wain on during the Vietnam War. Author Tim O’Brien is a Vietnam War veteran, an author, the narrator, and a teacher. The main character, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, is a Vietnam War soldier who is away at war fighting a mind battle about a woman he left behind in New Jersey because he is sick with love while trying to fulfill his duties as a soldier to keep America free. Tim O’Brien depicts in “The Things They Carried” a troubled man who also shoulders the burden of guilt when he loses one of his men to an ambush.
Bob Kiley, a soldier that everyone called Rat experienced a type of warfare that caused him a personal type of madness. O’Brien believes that Rat’s true experiences began when he lost his friend Lemon. Lemon and Rat was playing catch when Lemon stepped on a booby-trap. Today, people have counselors and support systems to assist them with deal with the death of a partner in war. However, the time of war Ray experience did not offer these benefits. To deal with his pain he attempted to take his frustration out on a water buffalo. He thought that by shooting the animal through various parts of its body would ease the pain that he felt. Once he wrote to his sister to tell her that “what a great brother she had (617). Lemon’s sister did not respond to the letter the he sent this hurt him even more. The truth in the story is that Rat experiences a true disconnect between the war and a person that has never experience the war.
Written by author Tim O’Brien after his own experience in Vietnam, “The Things They Carried” is a short story that introduces the reader to the experiences of soldiers away at war. O’Brien uses potent metaphors with a third person narrator to shape each character. In doing so, the reader is able to sympathize with the internal and external struggles the men endure. These symbolic comparisons often give even the smallest details great literary weight, due to their dual meanings. The symbolism in “The Things They Carried” guides the reader through the complex development of characters by establishing their humanity during the inhumane circumstance of war, articulating what the men need for emotional and spiritual survival, and by revealing the character’s psychological burdens.
“Rat” Kiley was born Bob Kiley on April 7 1939 in Albany, New York to Marie and Charlie Kiley. At age 11 Bob was given the nickname “Rat” by one of his friends when they were walking home from school one day when apparently Bob fell into a large open dumpster and when he emerged he had a few strings of spaghetti sticking out of the back of his pants. The nickname stuck with him all the way to his adulthood. Rat graduated from Creekside High School in 1957. He did not want to attend college right away but wanted to work in one of the factories in his home town to earn some money to pay for college. Even then his co-workers called him “Rat”. Two years later he had managed to save ten thousand dollar to put toward his college tuition but unfortunately he was drafted just like the rest of the men his age who were not attending college. When he was in Vietnam Rat encountered many terrible situations and was faced with severe heart ache when his best friend Curt Lemon is killed by a landmine. Rat was devastated by this terrible event and felt an extreme sense of loneliness especially when he wrote a letter to Curt’s sister and she never responded. Rat fought through the rest of the war seeing too many tragedies that are too horrible to mention here and when he returned to his family in 1973, two years before the war ended they found his behavior very strange. They found that he was not the same person that he was before and eventually the found that he had gone completely insane. Rat would mumble things to himself and would scream as if he saw his friend Curt being killed right in front of him.
In his last chapter O’Brien weaves a tale of when he first fell in love at the age of nine and how, although she has now departed the land of the living, he can still remember her and keep her alive through telling stories about her. In just the same way he can honor and remember those lost in Vietnam by recounting their exploits. These stories, regardless of their historic accuracy, serve to awaken the memory and kindle the emotions so that the dead may live on in the memories of those who loved them. That is the power of a story.
In The Things They Carried, an engaging novel of war, author Tim O’Brien shares the unique warfare experience of the Alpha Company, an assembly of American military men that set off to fight for their country in the gruesome Vietnam War. Within the novel, the author O’Brien uses the character Tim O’Brien to narrate and remark on his own experience as well as the experiences of his fellow soldiers in the Alpha Company. Throughout the story, O’Brien gives the reader a raw perspective of the Alpha Company’s military life in Vietnam. He sheds light on both the tangible and intangible things a soldier must bear as he trudges along the battlefield in hope for freedom from war and bloodshed. As the narrator, O’Brien displayed a broad imagination, retentive memory, and detailed descriptions of his past as well as present situations. 5. The author successfully uses rhetoric devices such as imagery, personification, and repetition of O’Brien to provoke deep thought and allow the reader to see and understand the burden of the war through the eyes of Tim O’Brien and his soldiers.
Through The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien moves beyond the horror of fighting in the Vietnam War to examine with sensitivity and insight the nature of courage and fear. Included, is a collection of interrelated stories. A few of the stories are brutal, while others are flawed, blurring the distinction between fact and fiction. All the stories, however, deal with one platoon. Some are about the wartime experiences of soldiers, and others are about a 43-year-old writer reminiscing about his platoon’s experiences. In the beginning chapter, O’Brien rambles about the items the soldiers carry into battle, ranging from can openers, pocketknives, and mosquito repellent o Kool-Aid, sewing kits, and M-16 assault rifles. Yet, the story is truly about the intangible things the soldiers “carry”: “grief, terror, love, longing… shameful memories (and) the common secret of cowardice” (Harris & O’Brien 21).
The novel, “The Things They Carried”, is about the experiences of Tim O’Brian and his fellow platoon members during their time fighting in the Vietnam War. They face much adversity that can only be encountered in the horrors of fighting a war. The men experience death of friends, civilians, enemies and at points loss of their rationale. In turn, the soldiers use a spectrum of methods to cope with the hardships of war, dark humor, daydreaming, and violent actions all allow an escape from the horrors of Vietnam that they experience most days.
The Things They Carried represents a compound documentary novel written by a Vietnam veteran, Tim O'Brien, in whose accounts on the Vietnam war one encounters graphical depictions of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Thus, the stories "Speaking of Courage," "The Man I Killed," "How to Tell a True War Story," "Enemies" and "Friends," "Stockings," and "The Sweetheart of The Song Tra Bong "all encompass various examples of PTSD.
He states that as a soldier, there is so much to soak in from war scenes that it all becomes a muddled mess. Therefore, the story of the moment can be different from each soldier’s perspective due to the parts where each man puts in his own ideas. This leads to some speculation as to whether or not O’Brien’s stories are true or false.
He even tells his reader to not pay attention to the details. In “How to Tell a True war Story” O’Brien states, “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way.”(pg. 67-68) This “what seemed to happen” can be referred to as the story truth. O’Brien is telling his readers that sometimes memories get blurred and the brain can forget what really happened. He later writes, “Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness” to further prove this point. (pg. 68) Without the normal stuff being told, the reader would not believe all of the traumatic events that took place in this war. While being compared to the crazy memories, the brain sees the normal stuff as a pointless memory. The brain therefore doesn’t see the necessity to remember this unimportant memory. So, when trying to tell this event later on, the human brain makes up a false memory to fill the lost memory’s place and to make the story seem more
The Things They Carried is a collection of stories about the Vietnam War that the author, Tim O’Brien, uses to convey his experiences and feelings about the war. The book is filled with stories about the men of Alpha Company and their lives in Vietnam and afterwards back in the United States. O’Brien captures the reader with graphic descriptions of the war that make one feel as if they were in Vietnam. The characters are unique and the reader feels sadness and compassion for them by the end of the novel. To O’Brien the novel is not only a compilation of stories, but also a release of the fears, sadness, and anger that he has felt because of the Vietnam War.