1. Cross feels that Lavender is killed because Cross himself was too busy daydreaming about Martha that he was unable to protect his men. Since Cross’s mind was in a distant place, he was unable to lead his team efficiently. Cross believes that if his mind was focused on the war he would have been able to protect Lavender.…
| |In May 1974 his writing career was launched off he worked for the Washington |…
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a very uniquely written book. This book is comprised of countless stories that, though are out of order, intertwine and capture the reader’s attention through the end of the novel. This book, which is more a collection of short stories rather than one story that has a beginning and an end, uses a format that will keep the reader coming back for more.…
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a series of short stories that focuses on the lives of a platoon of soldiers during the Vietnam War, the items they carry; both mandatory and not, and how they deal with the hardships while serving. Of course the items that these military men are required to carry are extremely important to their survival, I have chosen to focus more on the smaller more personal items, most being the emotional baggage they carry.…
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.…
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 for Martha distracts him from his responsibility as a lieutenant to have the backs of and “love” (6) his men. The intangible weight of Martha's love that he can't return distracts Cross from his duty as a lieutenant. Being distracted from his responsibilities…
“I would not be brave. That old image of myself as a hero, as a man of conscience and courage, all that was just a threadbare pipe dream.” The impasse reached by Tim O’Brien as mentioned in “On The Rainy River” was between his moral stance on the war and the preservation of his reputation. Rather than the blatantly obvious external conflict of the war this retelling emphasises the internal conflict and angst felt by the young men sentenced to fight in it. The personal battle mainly stems from the conflicting emotions of Tim O’Brien as if he stays true to his morals then he faces exiled, losing the respect of his parents or being subjected to ridicule. Whereas if he goes then he will be going against his own morals which are telling him to run for the sake of his family, his friends and most importantly, his sanity.…
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.…
In the short story “The Things They Carried,” written by Tim O’Brien, there is a lot of symbolism in each specific object that was mentioned. According to Dictionary.com, a symbolism is the practice of representing things by symbols, or of investing things with a symbolic meaning or character. A symbol is something used for or regarded as representing something else; a material object representing something, often something immaterial; emblem, token, or sign. The things each soldier carried defined each individual soldier. The story was very detailed in the objects the soldiers carried which tied into the emotional things the soldiers carried.…
“Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth." This concept may be confusing to those who read Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carried, for the first time. By using a number of different literary devices, such as juxtaposition, paradox, metaphors, and metafiction, O'Brien separates truth and fact from one and the other in his novel about his time in the Vietnam War. He shows the truth of what he was feeling through the war and after without being factual. O'Brien's explanation for not being totally factual in the book was that “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” “It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make…
It is in this chapter that O'Brien reveals that the only aspect of the novel thus far that hasn't been fabricated is the fact that he did walk through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier. "Almost everything else is invented" (179). However, it must be understood that he is simply bending the truth in order to convey the most feeling and emotion. "I want you to feel what I felt" (178), O'Brien explains. Evidently, there are times when invented war stories communicate his feelings more clearly than anything actual could. For example, "The Man I Killed" is about a VC soldier killed with a grenade by O'Brien. He is overcome by guilt and regret, but later in the book he reveals that he did not kill the man at all. He was simply present at the time of the young man's death. "But my presence was guilt enough I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief. I blamed myself" (178). He remembers feeling responsible and blaming himself, so he writes himself in as the one physically responsible for the death. It is much more powerful to tell the story this way; readers experience the guilt he felt even though he wasn't actually responsible. This is the sole purpose of O'Brien's styleto communicate feelings in the most effective and powerful way possible, without regard for…
The concept of death has always been a blurry topic to discuss but what if the concept of death was wrapped around a war, would that make things better? When people talk about death all they think about is the one person, their life, their life story and what all they have been through. In The Things They Carried the author uses death to help portray certain characters in their own unique way whether it’s from describing the way they died, or just what they had to look forward to, all the way back to how it affects the other people close to them and we get the details on that from the author and narrator. The narrator has quite a few characters that have died but I choose my characters to be Ted Lavender, young vietnamese soldier, Curt Lemon,…
Young uses both logical and emotional appeals to substantiate her views of the media portraying survivor’s stories for entertainment purposes as opposed to real-life traumatic events. Defending the survivors and using a logical appeal to readers, Young claims, “Yet poetry of witness requires ethical rigor, careful editing, and ongoing stewardship of the personal stories of living people because it’s quite easy to “do something” destructive, too. The stories aren’t just stories; they are evolving life-or-death truth. People’s memories move, their stance shifts, and the stories they tell are intricately bound up with personal survival. For that reason, the primary storytellers must be involved in shaping the public presentation of the work.” (Young…
Through writing about his experiences in Vietnam, O 'Brien 's character is able to find a medium in which he can sort through his emotions, since "by telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths" (158). He does not look upon his stories as therapy--he recounts his stories since they are a part of his past, and who he is now is the direct result of them:…
The happening-truth is different from the story-truth in several ways. The chief among them is that there is a detachment from the emotions that people find in stories. The happening-truth is a recollection of events. The happening-truth, while also being portrayed through stories is not the same. The reality creates differences for example in The Things They Carried O’Brien talks about a man he killed, he claims the story is false and just allows him to fill the void of his “faceless responsibility and faceless grief” (172).…