Preview

Things They Carried Rhetorical Analysis

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
824 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Things They Carried Rhetorical Analysis
The Things They Carried Argument Essay

Most people are not war veterans, and will never truly understand how soldiers felt when serving. But emotions are a common concept among people, and as people experience life they endure different emotions through different situations. When reading The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, you are shown through storytelling how the soldier felt when they were in Vietnam. Each story has different connections with different emotions to show how the soldier felt. When the reader can make emotional connections to a story by understanding the feelings associated with fear, guilt, and loneliness, O’Brien then has broken his rule of how to write a true war story. As human beings, we attach ourselves to objects
…show more content…
The story shows how a odd friendship between Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk came to be. The overall story sounds very skeptical as Jensen and Strunk “got into a fishfight. It was about something stupid-a missing jackknife” (O’Brien 62) and then Jensen “borrowed a pistol, gripped it by the barrel, and used it like a hammer to break his own nose” (O’Brien 63). The story has a point of showing how Jensen’s emotion made him believe that he need to break his own nose because he obviously was struggling with the fact of being in war and was lonely. At the end of “Enemies”, Jensen asked Strunk if everything between them was alright, which then shows how Jensen was struggling with being engulfed in the war and need to escape the war somehow, and that somehow was forming a friendship with Strunk.
O’Brien uses his rule of how to tell a true war story to make the reader think. By engaging the reader, he is able to better tell the stories he wants to tell. He created his rules to have readers think and question the truth behind every story in The Things They Carried, and that's how it should be with stories. You should never be able to just know the truth of the story, the best stories are the stories that engage the reader to think. When O’Brien breaks his rule, he is showing other authors how unique storytelling is and there are no set rules when crafting a

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Better Essays

    In this book the author Tim O' Brien uses many different little stories to sum of the big picture of war. He focuses in on many different characters, stories, and their specific feelings to help the reader get an actual feel of what he felt. Which he states on pg. 171 " I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer than happening-truth". While O' Briens main connection to the title focus's in on what each soldier physically carried, deeper than that is the soldiers own feelings, doubts, and fears.…

    • 1307 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, applies multiple techniques in his memoir in order to produce the theme of horror in war. He utilizes word connotation, literary/rhetorical techniques, sentence structure, and overall structure in the memoir. In an excerpt on page 199, O’Brien employs the combination of anaphora, metaphor, and negative word connotation to illustrate the horror of the Vietnam War.…

    • 492 Words
    • 2 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
  • Satisfactory Essays

    This novel is very different from the others that I have read. Tim O’Brien wrote this book to show how it was at Vietnam and what soldiers have to go thru. However he wrote this book under the genre of fiction because this way he could write things that were not true and still make it billable to the reader. Rather than him just saying things as they are. Perhaps if he told things as they really happen then the reader might not be interested of what was going on. Now the author wrote this book for two reasons.…

    • 289 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Tim O'Brien

    • 1263 Words
    • 6 Pages

    A platoon of seventeen soldiers from America travel in booby-trap swamps and through the hills of Vietnam. “They been ordered to set ambushes, execute night patrols, and search out and destroy the massive tunnel complexes south of Chu Lai constructed by Viet Cong guerrillas” (McCarthy). On their voyage the men carry something with them; the things they carry have a meaning to each soldier which distinguishes them. The men are not completely prepared to deal with the stresses of war emotionally. The story circles around Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and the burden he feels for the death of Lavender, one of his soldiers. “The Things They Carried” reflects on each soldier and their way of trying to escape from the war. American writer Tim O’Brien had many outstanding works including “The Things They Carried”. This work illustrates O’Brien’s use of style,…

    • 1263 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Many traits of man¡¦s inner nature are revealed through war. In the novel The Things They Carried, the characters of this series of stories embody traits of soldiers in the Vietnam War. Through writing, the author, Tim O¡¦Brien, portrays his feelings as a Vietnam soldier through this novel. He describes the loss of three fellow soldiers, Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon, and Kiowa and depicts the guilt and blame these deaths evoke.…

    • 651 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Tim O’Brien authored the novel “The Things They Carried” a novel filled with short stories about the Vietnam War. The first passage in the collection lists the numerous things the solders in O’Brien’s platoon carried. Varying from weapons, to thoughts of loved ones back home. Distorting the line between the tangible and intangible, O’Brien writes about the things like bibles, pantyhose, moccasins, and pictures. Things the men carried tangibly, but are used to give them something to think about other than the waning darkness of the war, that making them intangible. The intangible things are used to escape the war; weighing heavier than anything tangible possibly could. Specifically, they are burdened with death. The men carry the intangible burden of death, something always on their minds and weighing more than anything tangible they could ever carry. They did what they could not to acknowledge death, each using their own techniques try and put a spin on and lift the emotional baggage of war and war’s mortality.…

    • 829 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The author of The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien, incorporates various messages within his book. One of the most important messages within the text greatly deals with war and everything associated with it. As a veteran of the Vietnam War, O’Brien is exceedingly qualified to provide readers with an accurate depiction of what it feels like for a soldier to live in a constant state of war. The series of stories within The Things They Carried present us with the difficult choices forced upon those who have dealt with the conflicts of combat (Chen). O’Brien’s stories also show us that a war is never truly over; a great number of soldiers who survive a war must often face the damaging repercussions of warfare long after it has ended. Consequently, the message being presented in The Things They Carried by Tim O 'Brien is the notion that war has the power to transform people, altering and skewing their mental states, their principles, and their sense of morality by stripping human beings of their humanity, and instead replacing it with fear and trauma.…

    • 2765 Words
    • 12 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Although O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” is considered fiction in many ways it is Metafiction. "Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (Waugh 2.) Once in an interview O’Brien admitted to his conscious blurring of fact and fiction by way of using Metafiction to generate stories that are “more real” (Sawyer 117-126.) O’Brien’s practice of using Metafiction indisputably makes the events and stories conceivable for the reader. The reality of O’Brien’s description of the intangible items each man carried has been noted to have long-term implications for those who have had to lug around the psychological affects of war. According to an article in BMC Psychiatry, “Combat exposure is the factor most consistently associated with mental disorders and symptomatology. Research with Vietnam veterans demonstrated substantial associations between combat exposure and PTSD” (Kewley 1). In another article findings that suggest, “...Vietnam veterans are much more likely to report problems associated with posttraumatic stress disorder including ‘‘nightmares, loss of control of behavior, emotional numbing, withdrawal from the external environment, hyper alertness, anxiety, and depression”(Card 7). The way in which Tim O’Brien represents each character with both the physical and emotional baggage that he carries lends itself to constructing characters that become personal. The characters by way of these items that they carry have become believable. It is because of this believability that the reader can visualize the weight of each character. O’Brien’s ability to blur the lines between fiction and fact with the items carried in war ensures…

    • 1209 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Tim O’Brien’s, The Things They Carried, contained different memoirs that truly bring the actions of war to life for the reader. Obrien’s book expresses the real feelings a solider faces while getting ready to go into war, in war, and post war. Through his vivid descriptions the reader is able to emphasize with the emotional burdens and stresses solders must go through while on duty. We are able to observe the different coping mechanisms solders must endure, including, cutting them selves off from reality and preoccupying their mind with other, sometimes meaningless, thoughts .The chapter that had the largest impact on myself was “Night Life.” For me this passage truly depicted not just the physical, but mental battle soldiers must go through; and the extreme measures taken to relive themselves from the intensity of battle.…

    • 501 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Among all of the books I have read, and I have read a lot of books, I believe this one is the most intriguing when it comes to composition. Tim O'Brien, the author, has done what is rare in literature and composed a fictionalized autobiography. He brings together thoughts, ideas, emotions, and reality in order to create his own safe and satisfying reality. He tackles reader and author's perspective and creates a work that deserves to be what The Milwaukee Journal calls “...so powerful it steals your breath”.…

    • 700 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien is an enormously detailed fictional account of a wartime scenario in which jimmy Cross (the story’s main character) grows as a person, and the emotional and physical baggage of wartime are brought to light. The most obvious and prominent feature of O’Brien’s writing is a repetition of detail. O’brien also passively analyzes the effects of wartime on the underdeveloped psyche by giving the reader close up insight into common tribulations of war, but not in a necessarily expositorial sense.. He takes us into the minds of mere kids as they cope with the unbelievable and under-talked-about effects or rationalizing death, discomfort and loneliness as well as the themes of heroism, physical and mental pain, and a loss of innocence. Obrien achieves this through extended description, imagery and tone coupled with an intimate relationship with the stories main characters.…

    • 1168 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Things They Carried

    • 911 Words
    • 4 Pages

    In the book, The Things They Carried written by Tim O’Brien, the challenges faced by war are explained in the form of stories. The effects that war can have on a soldier in Vietnam are not solely limited to the physical state, but also the mental state, as is shown when O’Brien introduces the character Mary Anne Bell in chapter nine. The corruption that war brought to an individual’s life led to an altered view of morality and Innocence, as well as the desensitization of an individual.…

    • 911 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Death is an obscure concept to most people and by humanizing the boy and making him seem just like one of us who has dreams and a life outside of war. Tim O’Brien re-emphasizes “The Man I Killed later on in the book in “Good Form” talking about how if he had only told you about how he walked by the boy, then you would not have had any sympathy or interest in the situation. Tim O’Brien’s stories are worth something more to a reader than other stories about war because they offer a deeper and truer insight that comes from a place of fiction. In books, you will find that most of the time you learn more from a fictional story than a true…

    • 757 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    When authors put their pen to the paper to begin writing, they express themselves through their words. Through a heavy examination of a story the reader can frequently see that the author has expressed his or her own personal life into these short stories. Tim O’Brien is an American author who has shared his experiences of the Vietnam War through many of his famous works such as “If I Die in a Combat zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home”, “Going After Cacciato”, and the work studied here “The Things They Carried”. Author Tim O’Brien was thrown in the middle of the Vietnam War when he was drafted. During his tour of duty he experienced very gruesome and lonely things. O’Brien told the reader the things that these soldiers brought along with them…

    • 2380 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Better Essays