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
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In the first chapter of The Things They Carried‚ “The Thing They Carried”‚ Tim O’Brien uses the motif of intangible weights the men carry and how they have the strength to alter one’s performance and emotional state at war. The intangible weight of Martha’s love is like a barbell Jimmy Cross can never seem to let go of. Continuously carrying extra weight‚ Cross expresses how he "love[d] Martha more than his men" (6)‚ which results in the death of one of his men soldiers Ted Lavender. Cross’s love
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story of Alice fighting against a fearsome monster don’t share similar plots. However‚ Alice and Odysseus both fight against evil forces and the two protagonists parallel each other as well. When reading the epic poem and watching the movie‚ Homer and Tim Burton use similar characters and scenes. In Alice in Wonderland and The Odyssey‚ the identical heroes are called to an adventure to face challenging obstacles and they both share brutal battle scenes. The characters’ personalities in The Odyssey
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The article “The Changing Face of the American Family” by Tim Stanley focused on the topic of how the American family has changed in the past century. Stanley discusses the “nuclear family‚” which is a family centered around two parents. The nuclear family was forged by the unique economic and political circumstances of the 1950’s‚ was undermined by social revolution in the 1960’s and was revived as an ideal family in the 1970’s due to the deceptively rosy view of the past (Stanley 11). The idea
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In the novel‚ The Things They Carried‚ the narrator is revealed to be obedient yet a sensitive character. We see Tim O’Brien as an obedient person in the chapter Ambush. He explains how it was just instinct for him to throw the grenade at the man. “I had already pulled the pin on a grenade. I had come up to a crouch. It was entirely automatic.” (page 126). This quote shows that when he saw the man‚ with a weapon‚ walking on the trail‚ he only did what he was trained to do which was to the man. However
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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. Each soldier in the story “humps” an object
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The Things they Carried by Tim O’brien is a series of war stories that lean on the male perspective. If and when a woman appeared in the story‚ O’brien would idealize them as use for the soldiers when they came home with open arms and in hope for more. Women were used as a metaphor of innocents that the soldiers have to release to help for all the memories and horrors of the war. The innocents and fantasies of the book from the soldiers perspectives were used to either discriminate the women‚ or
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The theme that war changes a person is evident throughout almost every short story in the book The Things They Carried. Some are changed for the better‚ and some‚ not so much. Tim O’Brien used the characters he has built up to show the effects of war on different people. Out of the many themes included in this book‚ this is a very important one. Any situation will change you if you keep at it long enough‚ and that is just what happens to each and every person involved in a war. In the very first
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How the Characters in Tim Winton’s Minimum of Two struggle to cope with change Winton’s stories depict many kinds of change and the characters struggle to come to terms with their new circumstances. Coping with change is made more difficult by the fact that many of the characters are unable to express themselves and so resolution is often elusive. In other cases‚ nostalgia for the past also hinders the characters progress and development. Jerra struggles most of the time to cope with change‚ because
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Kendall Professor Vazquez ENC 1102 T-TH 12:30 – 1:45 11 February 2013 “Coping through what they carried ” Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” was set in the time of the Vietnam War‚ and portrayed that each of the soldiers had something they carried. These things that each of the men carried represented them and how they coped when they were in the war. They needed these things as a necessity. Sometimes the things would get in the way of their thoughts and cause them to be distracted
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