Things They Carried By Tim O Brien: Character Analysis

American’s often romanticize war; it’s most often thought of as a heroic, complex story with a great moral in the ending, but O’Brien has clearly mentioned that if a war story has a great moral, that you should be skeptical of it(Things They Carried Themes...). In The Things They Carried, O’Brien tells a few stories of the men of the Alpha Company, stories he thought the boys would appreciate being told, but he never clearly states a moral. He leaves it up to the reader to decide the point. The point is that any stressful situation can create a dynamic character, and he demonstrates that by telling stories of how the things the men took with them affected their consequences. The Things They Carried is unique in that the author, Tim O’Brien, is both the writer and the main character. In fact, the book is about an event that actually occurred in O’Brien’s life. The Things They Carried, however, is not a work of nonfiction; it’s a fictionally written story based off of the things O’Brien experienced. O’Brien’s life was that of the typical American kid. Born in 1946, he grew up in Austin, Minnesota spending his time reading and learning magic tricks as a way to transform his reality and entertain himself. His childhood was filled with

Being in Vietnam was a struggle inside itself; the sticky atmosphere, the marshy waste-fields, the bullets and traps all took a psychological toll on the men stuck there. Norman Bowker took his own life because he felt he failed his friends by not saving Kiowa’s life. Lt. Cross realized in a short amount of time that he had to leave behind his fantasy of Martha in order to preserve his men’s lives. Mary Anne Bell, however fictional, is not nearly the same person she was before taking in Vietnam. Maybe if they had carried something different, they would or would not have survived or been