Imagery In The Things They Carried

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried follows a group of soldiers through their tour of Vietnam. Throughout the story the reader is provided with imagery from a soldier coincidentally named Tim O’Brien, detailing the items his fellow soldiers carry in their knapsacks. The items carried show great personal connections to one another, as well as their lives outside of the war. Not only are the items described, but the emotion of warfare is depicted in great detail. Therefore, O’Brien’s imagery creates an important narrative from a soldier’s point of view. To begin, throughout the short story we are provided with detail about the items each man carries. O’Brien describes the items and their weight to signify the mass these men carry on their backs. O’Brien describes, “As a big man Henry Dobbins carried the M-60, which weighed 23 …show more content…
Steven Kaplan, author of The Underlying Certainty of the Narrator in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, agrees, “O'Brien introduces the reader to some of the things, both imaginary and concrete, emotional and physical, that the average foot soldier had to carry through the jungles of Vietnam” (Kaplan par. 4). In paragraph forty-one of the story, readers can see evidence of emotional and physical imagery as Lieutenant Cross digs a hole with his six pound shovel while trying not to cry over the loss of a fellow soldier. Other critics try to find where O’Brien finds the inspiration for his depiction of the war. Tobey Herzog, author of A Soldier’s Heart and Mind: Going after Cacciato and The Things They Carried, believes that O’Brien pulled inspiration from his own time in Vietnam. Herzog points out that the narrator shares the same name as the author, as well as details from O’Brien’s other works sharing similar details (Herzog par. 29-30) Overall, readers and critics can agree that with the use of imagery O’Brien paints a strong picture of the Vietnam