Things They Carried By Tim O Brien: Chapter Analysis

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In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien talks about how the field is symbolic of the Vietnam War. The novel is about a company of soldier in the Vietnam War. One day, the company is ordered to stay the night in a field on the bank of the Song Tra Bong river. Then, it starts raining and the river overflows it’s banks and floods the field. A soldier named Kiowa is killed in the field. The field represents how Vietnam seemed to suffocate the soldiers who were there. The field is Vietnam, it claimed the lives, souls and innocence of the men who were there and some of the men who survived it never really came home. O’Brien first talks about the field, metaphorically, in the chapter “Speaking of Courage”. This chapter takes place where the now Vietnam veteran Norman Bowker is driving around a lake in his home town. Every day he just drives around the seven mile loop of the lake. The lake was described to be dirty. O’Brien states, “Fed by neither streams nor springs, the lake was often filthy and algaed, relying on fickle prairie rains for replenishment” 132). As he is circling the lake, Norman Bowker keeps thinking of the time that he lost his …show more content…

That night when Kiowa died, it was not really Norman Bowker’s fault, it was O’Brien’s. O’Brien was talking to Kiowa and was going to show him a picture of his girl he has back home. He then turned on a flashlight to show him the picture. Then, it started raining and the Song Tra Bong river, which the field was on the bank of, started flooding. In the morning, the troops searched for him. O’Brien recalls, “Leaning forward, heads down, they used the butts of their weapons as probes, wading across the field to the river and then turning and wading back again” (155). They did not want to believe that they lost such a good man to the mud field, and ultimately to the trechery of

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