Theme Of Death In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

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In the book The Things They Carried, has a lot to deal with the Vietnam war. If you are talking about the war you will most likely talk about death and how tragic death can be. Death could make you feel sad, make you want to honor a fallen friend, and it could scare you. This book gives you all the elements of everyone of those parts that I just described and more. The importance of death in this book cuts deep, it tells a different story for each kid that lost their lives fight for a war that's not really theirs to begin with. In the The Things They Carried there was a line saying”They carried their reputations.They carried the soldiers greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing.Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.” That is basically saying that these kids are sent to war by the government basically, and in this specific war there is a lot of fatalities. So sending a person to this war is basically like suicide to them. This quote gives you a basic summarization of the whole book. All of the problems in this is caused by them going to war and either dying, or having the fear of death. …show more content…

This kid was just walking around looking for someone around from the opposite country, but Tim sees him before he does. Tim has no problem with this kid, but due to the fact that he is afraid to die or one of his mates to die. He must kill the kid, he didn’t intentionally kill the kid though, he just wants the grande to go off and he runs away. ”I was terrified.There were no thoughts about killing. The grenade was to make him go away-” Where his exact words in this problem, he just wanted to scare the kid away and to me that shows that he is in fear of

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