Things They Carried 'By Tim O' Brien: Character Analysis
The Things They Carried
By Tim O’Brien
Describe your speaker. What do you know about him/her? What do you NOT know about him/her? What makes your speaker an effective story teller? What character in the novel do you believe to be the least effective? Why? How does the speaker relate to this character? I know that the speaker is conscious of what he writes about, meaning that he knows he writes only about the Vietnam War and that it has consumed his writing career yet can’t help but continue to write about the stories and his buddies who died and how it felt to be a young soldier against his will. What I don’t know about him is what really happened to him after he got back home from the war; he added a story about a …show more content…
“Now, perhaps, you can understand why I’ve never told this story before… but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn’t decide, I couldn’t act, I couldn’t comport myself…” This quote shows how the speaker is afraid of not knowing. He does not like feeling venerable or exposed so that frightened him which ultimately made him embarrassed to tell that story. He was not reluctant because within the story he had cried, as he mentions in the same quote, but because he felt like he “couldn’t comport [himself] with even a pretense of modest dignity.”
2. “You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote.” This shows how the speaker knows about true war stories. Not only that, but he knows how they’re supposed to sound, feel like, what they entitle, and how many lies are in the story. For example, he explains how a true war story cannot be believed and if you do then you must be skeptical: “often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible
By Tim O’Brien
Describe your speaker. What do you know about him/her? What do you NOT know about him/her? What makes your speaker an effective story teller? What character in the novel do you believe to be the least effective? Why? How does the speaker relate to this character? I know that the speaker is conscious of what he writes about, meaning that he knows he writes only about the Vietnam War and that it has consumed his writing career yet can’t help but continue to write about the stories and his buddies who died and how it felt to be a young soldier against his will. What I don’t know about him is what really happened to him after he got back home from the war; he added a story about a …show more content…
“Now, perhaps, you can understand why I’ve never told this story before… but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn’t decide, I couldn’t act, I couldn’t comport myself…” This quote shows how the speaker is afraid of not knowing. He does not like feeling venerable or exposed so that frightened him which ultimately made him embarrassed to tell that story. He was not reluctant because within the story he had cried, as he mentions in the same quote, but because he felt like he “couldn’t comport [himself] with even a pretense of modest dignity.”
2. “You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote.” This shows how the speaker knows about true war stories. Not only that, but he knows how they’re supposed to sound, feel like, what they entitle, and how many lies are in the story. For example, he explains how a true war story cannot be believed and if you do then you must be skeptical: “often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible