Preview

What Is The Purpose Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
278 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
What Is The Purpose Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien
In Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, the author uses explicit details to illustrate what the experience was like for the American soldiers during the Vietnam War. O'Brien is a writer and Vietnam War veteran and in his novel, he delivers memories of his service in Vietnam and brings them to life. The Vietnam War began in 1955 and was a long, costly armed conflict against communism. A large majority of soldiers in the war served because of the draft. By 1968, the number of American soldiers in Vietnam surpassed half a million, and the conduct of the war had become exceedingly brutal. Many peopled opposed the war and protested against it. Young men were burning their draft cards or fleeing to Canada to avoid fighting in what they considered

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    War! Seems like every where we turn anymore you hear a story about war. The story of “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien takes place during the Vietnam War. Tim O’Brien narrated the story, and is writing from first hand experiences. This story gives you a good insight of how soldiers think during such difficult times. Throughout this story you’ll see how love can affect a person’s judgment even during a war.…

    • 614 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Things They Carried, a novel by Tim O’Brien, is a collection of war stories told from a fictional Vietnam veteran’s perspective. O’Brien elucidates the physical and emotional barrier war creates between men and women to help demonstrate the frustration soldiers have with women in war.…

    • 1172 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    what's to come. Shame of why they are at the war. Others carry guilt for allowing the death of a fellow…

    • 1545 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Tim O’Brien is a very gifted author, but he is also a veteran of the Vietnam War and fought with the United States in that controversial war. Tim O’Brien was drafted into the Vietnam War in 1968. He served as an infantryman, and obtained the rank of sergeant and won a Purple Heart after being wounded by shrapnel. He was discharged from the Vietnam War in 1970. I believe that O’Brien’s own images and past experiences he encountered in the Vietnam War gave him inspiration to write the story “The Things They Carried.” O’Brien tells the story in third person narrative form about Lt. Jimmy Cross and his platoon of young American men in the Vietnam War. In “The Things They Carried” we can see differences and similarities between the characters…

    • 1684 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The title of Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, paints a vague mental image of people carrying something – an image that is not yet complete for the reader to grasp the purpose of the novel. ‘Things’ are often assumed to be physical, in this novel, the ‘things’ that the soldiers carried were the mental burdens during and after the Vietnam War. Through the use of narratives of the different soldiers, O’Brien is able to follow each characters physical and mental weight that they carried. The…

    • 918 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Many people, in some point in their lives will experience a death of a loved one and will try to cope with it as best as they can. In “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien talks about his war stories and how he and the soldiers handled the deaths of the soldiers while at war. The soldiers had to deal with the stress, sadness, and guilt when seeing their partner get killed. O’Brien talks about the different coping mechanisms the soldiers use when facing the death of a fellow comadre. The soldiers tell jokes, write letters, tell stories, take responsibility of their death, and even reenact the death scene.…

    • 1081 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    In Vietnam veteran and author Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried the reader is given a list of both the physical and mental items that a soldier has to carry during war. The way O’Brien incorporates these lists into his writing indisputably makes the events and stories conceivable for the reader because each item defines the nature of the men in alpha platoon. O’Brien’s depiction of the men in alpha platoon does more than define each man’s personality but it enables a reader with no knowledge of war to experience the reality of it. O’Brien’s obscures the definitively drawn line between socioeconomic classes by way of war. The Vietnam War was the first war broadcasted on television and it was also a war where those on the battlefield were…

    • 1209 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    There are many different controversies on the information in “The Things They Carried”. Some believe to tell a good story, there's only facts and no truth, but some think that there needs to be all fictional elements and no facts to make a good story. A majority of people say that an excellent story starts with facts and adds in other elements like metaphors, symbolism, and imagery because visualizing the story helps the reader connect to the unfamiliar event.…

    • 690 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    When one thinks of war, the general thought is that it inspires acts of patriotism and heroism. No one really looks deeper into the topic to find that along with patriotism and heroism there are often feelings of shame and loneliness. In The Things They Carried it is clear that most of the soldiers in the war do not come back with a sense of pride or honor. Most come back wishing they had never gone at all. Tim O'Brien reveals that because Vietnam precipitated such traumatic experiences, his storytelling is a great way to cope with his shame and loneliness, emphasizing that the war experience is not one of patriotism and heroism, but one of loneliness and guilt.…

    • 765 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Field Trip Symbolism

    • 489 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The Vietnam War was a long costly armed conflict that wounded the U.S. The communist regime of North Vietnam was a war fought by the Viet Cong against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The war was increasingly unpopular at home it ended with the withdrawal of U.S. forces. More than 3 million people, including 58,000 Americans, were killed in the conflict. Tim O’Brien the author of “The Things They Carried” is book that recounts his own experience in the Vietnam War and allows him to give a vivid description on the war. He enters the war as scared young man. The war leaves a guilt-ridden middle-aged man who tells stories about Vietnam in order to cope with his painful memories. O’Brien uses imagery and symbolism in order to…

    • 489 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a book about the Vietnam War. In this novel O’Brien takes a main focus on the emotional and physical weight that the soldiers carry. In the beginning of the story O’Brien focuses on the physical components of what the soldiers carry, along with the sentimental value of the things they carry. Such as Jimmy Cross carrying the pictures of Martha, pebbles from Martha, and Henry Dobbins carrying his girlfriend’s panty hose around his neck. Toward the middle of the novel Tim O’Brien mentions the emotional toll that killing other soldiers has on the soldiers. He tells us the thoughts that go through the soldiers heads and how each death impacts them the most. He also talks about the questions that the soldiers have after they kill another soldier, such as, what life they live back home. By the end of…

    • 1234 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien shares some of his chilling experiences in the Vietnam War using a rather unconventional form. He writes war stories and most of the ones in this…

    • 700 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    TTTC

    • 2236 Words
    • 6 Pages

    In the novel, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien not only are there many cases of lost innocence but there are many other complications that come with it. The novel itself is stated to be a fiction novel, but in many examples it shows that Tim O’Brien himself had a personal connection to the stories told. This leaves us with the idea that just like his character, Tim O’Brien was using storytelling to combat his experiences in the Vietnam War. It seems as though O’Brien has a lot of themes that contradict themselves, such as; what is happening truth and story truth, loss of innocence and imagining it is still there, courage and cowardice, and guilt versus redemption. These are many themes found throughout the novel, they all prove that it is not just the physical things that these young men carried during the war, but one of the heaviest things these men carried were their emotional burdens.…

    • 2236 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    A 21-year-old man by the name of Tom O’Brien was drafted into the American War in Vietnam merely one month after graduating from college. Tom speaks of his journey of living with the shame of events that took place the summer of 1968. War to Tom is sickening and revolting; there was no unity or purpose. The 1960’s were a period of social disturbance with both the feminist and the civil rights movements occurring. In addition, the United States’ was divided by those who agreed and those who did not agree with the US’s involvement in the Vietnam war. When he received his inauguration, Tom was trapped and felt hopeless. “All around me the options seemed to be narrowing, as if I were hurtling down a huge black funnel, the whole world squeezing in tight. There was no…

    • 620 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In “The Things They Carried,” a short story by Tim O’Brien, the reader is able to see, in great detail, each of the characters ways of dealing with the atrocities of the Vietnam War by what they choose to carry; how symbolically they use these objects as a means for remembrance of what they have left behind, to escape what they deal with each day, and for some, a false sense of security and/or control over the violence and death that surrounds them.…

    • 450 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays