Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried, includes “The Lives of the Dead” a story about remembering those who have died even though the novel seems to be about war. Although the passage seems to have little relevance to Vietnam, it addresses the relationship between life and death.
O’Brien includes this story in a book about war because it is necessary to remember the dead so that they don’t disappear in our lives. The war, perhaps the very cause of most of the deaths in The Things They Carried, is not something that should end someone’s life and for others to forget. “And yet right here, in the spell of memory and imagination, I can still see her as if through ice, as if I’m gazing into some other world, a place where there are no brain tumors and no funeral homes, where there are no bodies at all. I can see Kiowa, too, and Ted Lavender and Curt Lemon, and sometimes I can even see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights” (pg 232). Furthermore, Linda represents Tim’s first experience of life (through love) and death, as well as reinforce the theme of loss of innocence, “She’d say amazing things sometimes. “Once you’re alive,” …show more content…
The story is placed at the end of the novel, and it can only be there because he mentions everyone that died previously in the book, by placing it at the end it brings together all of the stories. If this narrative were anywhere else in the novel it will one: be a spoiler and two: wouldn’t reinforce the meaning of the book as a whole. The main theme of this novel is bringing the dead back to life through storytelling,“Lying in bed at night, I made up elaborate stories to bring Linda alive in my sleep” (pg230). Timmy would visualize moments that never happened with Linda but he helped to cope with her death, he applies this to the other soldiers that he has seen died as
O’Brien includes this story in a book about war because it is necessary to remember the dead so that they don’t disappear in our lives. The war, perhaps the very cause of most of the deaths in The Things They Carried, is not something that should end someone’s life and for others to forget. “And yet right here, in the spell of memory and imagination, I can still see her as if through ice, as if I’m gazing into some other world, a place where there are no brain tumors and no funeral homes, where there are no bodies at all. I can see Kiowa, too, and Ted Lavender and Curt Lemon, and sometimes I can even see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights” (pg 232). Furthermore, Linda represents Tim’s first experience of life (through love) and death, as well as reinforce the theme of loss of innocence, “She’d say amazing things sometimes. “Once you’re alive,” …show more content…
The story is placed at the end of the novel, and it can only be there because he mentions everyone that died previously in the book, by placing it at the end it brings together all of the stories. If this narrative were anywhere else in the novel it will one: be a spoiler and two: wouldn’t reinforce the meaning of the book as a whole. The main theme of this novel is bringing the dead back to life through storytelling,“Lying in bed at night, I made up elaborate stories to bring Linda alive in my sleep” (pg230). Timmy would visualize moments that never happened with Linda but he helped to cope with her death, he applies this to the other soldiers that he has seen died as