War In Tim O 'Brien's The Things They Carried'

Kimberly LaChaine
Period 2
January 3, 2017 The Effects of War The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien represents the epitome of dehumanization that war inflicts on people. Each character is involved in a short story that makes up the entire novel; their different traits make up not only their personality but their entire persona and how their social role contributed to the overall message. The characters participation in the war leads to many tragic fates such as absurdity, trauma, and suicide. In the novel, Mary Anne, Tim O’Brien, and Norman Bowker’s lives were deeply changed by their time in Vietnam because they were forced to adapt to the demands of war and learned to cope with their emotional baggage and mental burdens.
For example, another character who was transformed by the horrors of war was Tim O’Brien, and in the chapter, “The Man I Killed” Tim was affected by the war in a traumatic and gruesome way. He is left with guilt, grief, and silence after murdering a young Vietnamese man. The man’s corpse was described in detail with having his jaw in his throat, and a star shaped hole in one eye. Tim is unable to look away from the corpse and begins imagining what the man's life was like before murdering him. He imagined him to be involved with math and love and he came to the conclusion that this “frail-looking, delicately boned young man would not have wanted to be a soldier and in his heart would have feared performing badly in battle” (121). Tim feels guilty that he killed this innocent man because he sees himself in the corpse. Tim feels grief and identifies with the man because he imagines that they both felt obligated to fight in the war to fulfill their nations duty even when they both originally did not want to fight at all. As Tim stares at the corpse, he is unable to speak to the other platoon members and is silenced by his internal conflict of just murdering someone. Kiowa, one of the platoon members, tries to comfort Tim by saying, “I’ll tell you the straight truth… The guy was dead the second he stepped on the trail… we all had him zeroed” (123). Tim is left to face his dehumanizing companions and left to ponder
Mary Anne did not originally dream of consuming the war, yet after converting to the dangerous and edgy lifestyle, she says, “Sometimes I want to eat this place. The whole country -- the dirt, the death -- I just want to swallow it and have it there inside me” (106). The war unapologetically and completely corrupted a young innocent girl and transformed her into a nasty war animal. Tim O’Brien’s dream was to avoid the war at all costs, yet he participated in the war and took a life. War brought out the evil instinct Tim inherited and although he wanted nothing to do with the war, “Beyond anything else, he was afraid of disgracing himself” (121). Norman Bowker’s dream was to find an escape from the war and be at peace with the loss of his friend. However, his guilt would not let him live with himself. He tried to cope with the grief by occupying his time with pickup basketball and odd jobs, but the war made Norman feel so alienated and alone that he physically could not talk about it and thought the best decision was to take his life. The conclusions drawn about men and war are that it brings out the negative qualities in people and although one can physically escape the war, the war never emotionally leaves someone