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What literary devices are in the things they carried
Parallels between the Vietnam war and the things they carried
Parallels between the Vietnam war and the things they carried
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Strong, brave, and powerful are usually the words that come to mind when you think of a traditional war hero. In Tim O’Brien’s novel he uses war heroes that aren’t what people usually imagine when they think of a war hero. They are straight out of high school, and most of the soldiers in his novel are cowards. They are scared of going into the war and even when they have a chance to save one of their friends they just let them die. Not using traditional war heroes allowed Tim O’Brien to show that not all heroes are heroic and courageous, and that they were just normal people going into a war they didn’t understand.
O’Brien does not use traditional war heroes so that the reader can understand the truth of how soldiers really felt in the war. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross felt a huge responsibility for the lives of the men that he led. After one of the soldiers named Ted Lavender was shot and killed Jim Cross said that “He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war.” When Rat Kileys friend Curt Lemon died he felt so much grief for the death of his friend. Rat Kiley was so depressed that he punished an innocent baby buffalo, “He stepped back and shot it through the right front knee. The animal did not make a sound. It went down hard, then got up again, and Rat took careful aim and shot off an ear. He shot it in the hindquarters and in the little hump at its back. He shot it twice in the flanks. It wasn’t to kill; it was to hurt.” He punished the innocent buffalo because his emotions took control of him. Years after Tim O’Brien’s friend Kiowa died he felt that he had to revisi...
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...ter of live or die. I was in no real peril. Almost certainly the young man would have passed me by. And it will always be that way.” This soldier realized that maybe he was the enemy and the other soldier was the hero. Everyone has questions of morality and normal heroes would not show the questions of morality.
Tim O’Brien wrote his novel with non-traditional war heroes to show many things about war that the reader did not know about. He did this to show the reader that not even soldiers are immune to emotions in the warzone. Also, to show that not everyone is fearless and heroic and people have fear inside of them. He also did this to show the controversy with the war in Vietnam. Not using traditional war heroes allowed Tim O’Brien to show that not all heroes are heroic and courageous, and that they were just normal people going into a war they didn’t understand.
Tim O'Brien is confused about the Vietnam War. He is getting drafted into it, but is also protesting it. He gets to boot camp and finds it very difficult to know that he is going off to a country far away from home and fighting a war that he didn't believe was morally right. Before O'Brien gets to Vietnam he visits a military Chaplin about his problem with the war. "O'Brien I am really surprised to hear this. You're a good kid but you are betraying you country when you say these things"(60). This says a lot about O'Brien's views on the Vietnam War. In the reading of the book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Tim O'Brien explains his struggles in boot camp and when he is a foot soldier in Vietnam.
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 violent nature that the soldiers acquired during their tour in Vietnam is one of O'Brien's predominant themes in his novel. By consciously selecting very descriptive details that reveal the drastic change in manner within the men, O'Brien creates within the reader an understanding of the effects of war on its participants. One of the soldiers, "Norman Bowler, otherwise a very gentle person, carried a Thumb. . .The Thumb was dark brown, rubbery to touch. . . It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen"(O'Brien 13). Bowler had been a very good-natured person in civilian life, yet war makes him into a very hard-mannered, emotionally devoid soldier, carrying about a severed finger as a trophy, proud of his kill. The transformation shown through Bowler is an excellent indicator of the psychological and emotional change that most of the soldiers undergo. To bring an innocent young man from sensitive to apathetic, from caring to hateful, requires a great force; the war provides this force. However, frequently are the changes more drastic. A soldier named "Ted Lavender adopted an orphaned puppy. . .Azar strapped it to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and squeezed the firing device"(O'Brien 39). Azar has become demented; to kill a puppy that someone else has adopted is horrible. However, the infliction of violence has become the norm of behavior for these men; the fleeting moment of compassion shown by one man is instantly erased by another, setting order back within the group. O'Brien here shows a hint of sensitivity among the men to set up a startling contrast between the past and the present for these men. The effect produced on the reader by this contrast is one of horror; therefore fulfilling O'Brien's purpose, to convince the reader of war's severely negative effects.
O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried layering themes on top of themes, but what makes it amazing is the way he presents these themes. Every single one intertwined with another. Burdens. Truth. Death. The soldiers carried their burdens and the death of their friends and enemies, and they live on as storytellers telling their war stories, but can there really be a true war story?
Tim O’Brien is doing the best he can to stay true to the story for his fellow soldiers. Tim O’Brien believed that by writing the story of soldiers in war as he saw it brings some type of justice to soldiers in a war situation.
When O'Brien says that a true war story is not about war he means that a war story is not about death, fighting or war, it is about the soldiers grim experiences. O’Brien writes “A true war story in never about war… It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow” (62). The quote demonstrates that O'Brien's definition of a war story does not describe what happens but it describes the feelings and emotions that were felt because of what happened. A true war story does not focus on what happened but it should focus on the pain that the soldiers felt.
Throughout the novel, Tim O’Brien illustrates the extreme changes that the soldiers went through. Tim O’Brien makes it apparent that although Vietnam stole the life of millions through the death, but also through the part of the person that died in the war. For Tim O’Brien, Rat Kiley, Mary Anne and Norman Bowker, Vietnam altered their being and changed what the world knew them as, into what the world could not understand.
Although the soldiers were united and served for the same goal, each of the men had a different motivation. For O’Brien, his motivation to join the war was the shame of running away. Almost all of the characters were afraid of being ashamed, and that served as a drive for them to do acts of heroism and similarly acts of stupidity. For example, in the story “On the Rainy River”, shame drove O’Brien to do an act of heroism as a fear of being ashamed. O’Brien wrote “For more than twenty years I 've had to live with it, feeling the shame, trying to
Many soldiers of today know what courage is. Courage is doing what is needed to do, not what absolutely must be done. In Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”, the soldiers were not what one would think of as courageous. The soldiers were courageous in the sense that their courage came from fear of dishonor. The soldiers did what must be done in order to keep their honorable reputation. True courage was not present until the end of the story.
When I think of soldiers, I see them all being identical in a way where they all have the same mindset about following orders and having the same beliefs about how they acted going into war. In the first chapter, O’Brien states how each man is uniquely different and how the things they carry defines them. Ted Lavender was scared, so he carried tranquilizers. Dave Jensen cared about hygiene, so he carried a toothbrush and floss. Lieutenant cross could only think about Martha, so he brought pictures and letters from her. Henry Dobbin carried extra rations of food because he was a big man (O’Brien, 2). When I think of soldiers over in a different country, they all have the same backpack and have a strict list of what they can and cannot bring. This gave me a new insight about how unalike they actually were in Vietnam and how they could basically bring whatever they felt they needed, even drugs. Some of O’Brien’s stories also gave me a new awareness of how different each man copes after they come home from the war. “Norman Bowker, who three years later hanged himself in the locker room YMCA in his hometown in central Iowa” (O’Brien, 155). This was one of the unfortunate ways one soldier dealt with coming home from the war. Also, Tim O’Brien used stories of his experiences to cope with his way of coming back home. I think it is significant that
It shows the trust these soldiers had among one another and their dedication to what they believe in. It also give me a good idea of how cowards were looked at in society. This shows the courage these men had and that they had no doubt in their hearts that what they were doing was the right thing. These soldiers were willing to die than to come back home with their head down. The patriotism these men had by far outmatched any doubts they had with themselves. This article shows that this war had a lot more meaning behind it than most see. The biggest enemy each soldier had wasn't the army on the other side raining bullets at their head, but rather the one inside. They had to overcome the fear of death and to throw their own lives aside for the sake of their cause and those fighting alongside
Throughout history people have shared bought and sold books for the purpose of storing and transferring information. Books date back to when the fist forms of writing began. For a book to last hundreds, even thousands of years is pretty amazing. The Art of War is one of those books. This book has been passed down generation to generation to aid in the creation of strong leaders.
I didn’t really expect anything one way or another from Tim O’Brian’s view of what a war story is. I grew up watching the World War II movies on the weekend TV, they had a good guy (Allies) vs. bad guy (Axis) feel to them. The Allied soldiers fought honorably and the Axis not so much. Later in the Eighties and Nineties, I watched the Vietnam movies and some TV shows that portrayed a different message. That the good guys were capable of doing bad things and Vice versa. So I guess if I were to expect anything from Tim O’Brian It would be the later viewpoint of no absolute good, and the toll of physical and emotional struggle.
The Thirty Years War was a series of conflicts, not-knowingly involving most European countries from 1618 to 1648. The war, which was fought mainly in Germany, was started when Bohemian Protestants furiously attacked the Holy Roman Emperor in terms to impose a restriction on their religious and civil liberties. By understanding the Thirty Years War, you will notice the notable religious, political and social changes. The changes paved the religious and political maps of Europe. Not only did this war affect the religious and political demographic, it caused populations to perish and lose large amounts of their goods. What was known as a religious battle, turned out to be a political feud in competition of which state has the greater power affecting men, women, soldiers and civilians. “[The bohemians] had no idea that their violent deed would set off a chain reaction of armed conflict that would last thirty years and later be called Europe’s “first world war” of the modern era.” When the war ended, the lands were defiled and over 5 million people were killed.