Carry The Shame In O Brien's The Things They Carried

Carry the Shame Shame plays a very interesting role in the novel, The Things They Carried. Guilt and shame come together conjointly. Shame was used in many cases of the novel. It was a form of motivation to some cases. It was also a stimulation of choices that the soldiers made that were not the best choices. The choices were unwise and possibly led to regret. Every soldier carries a piece of shame. There are soldiers who may have carried more shame than the others. The amount of shame they carried pushed them to become who they are. In this case, it pushed them to become the soldiers they are. The shame pushed them to war being that they were afraid of being seen as cowardly or weak. The fear of how others perceived them drove them to the …show more content…
This chapter occurs when O’Brien is at war. He is faced against his enemy, in which he had seen the other soldiers die in the hands of. The chapter begins describing the condition of the man that he killed. “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman’s, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was lightly freckled, his fingernails were clean, the skin at his left cheeks were peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood was thick and shiny and it was this wound that killed him” (O’Brien, 108). O’Brien remembers the way the man looks so vividly, that he can tell ever feature. No matter how much comfort O’Brien is given, he cannot stomach the thought of the life he has just taken. This leads to his shame because he realizes that the man killed was just like him, a man at