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Tim O 'Brien's The Things They Carried'

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Tim O 'Brien's The Things They Carried'
1. Explain the significance of the title. In addition to their gear, the soldiers carry such qualities as distrust of the white man, all they could bear, grief, terror, love, fear. How does O’Brien use so many abstractions in these stories?
a. 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 …show more content…
In “On the Rainy River” we learn the 21-year-old O’Brien’s theory of courage: “Courage, I seemed to think comes to us in finite qualities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down... it was a comforting theory” What might the 43-year-old O’Brien’s theory of courage be? What does this story have to say about choices and consequences?
a. After 22 years of fighting and life after war, O’Brien undoubtedly has a different outlook on life and the concept of courage. His experiences and the experiences of those who he surrounded himself with suggests that at the age of 43, O’Brien would have thought that courageous people do not wait for an opportunity to show their courage, they are always courageous. The influence of war has left a permanent mark on O’Brien and according to “On the Rainy River” he regrets his decision. The last three sentences of the chapter are “I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to war” (61) which are written by 43-year old O’Brien and suggest that his choice to go to war was the wrong decision and the consequences are all of the emotional and physical burdens that he left Vietnam with. All of the decisions made in the story had a consequence, whether good or bad, and have changed the men (and women) in the story in some
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