The Things They Carried Analysis

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried portray heartbreakingly candid representations of what it means to be a man or woman in society unlike any other novels one might read in their high school career. Both texts delineate the delicate relationships between men and women. O’Brien paints how toxic masculinity perverts men’s ability to have meaningful relationships with women while Morrison illustrates the demonization of maturity in women. Morrison and O’Brien elucidate the twisted infatuation people harbor for the innocence of women; they depict men abusing their power to pursue and corrupt women’s innocence, women shaming women for becoming “dirty”, and people idolizing the women they view as pure and clean. The men of both novels are drawn to women’s innocence like flies to honey; they seek it out and seek to devour it. The most significant relationship O’Brien’s narrator, Tim, has with a woman is when they are both nine years old. O’Brien creates an idealized illusion of Linda, making her the perfect memory that no other woman in Tim’s life could hope to equal. Tim swears that his love for Linda was “as deep and rich as love can ever get” and that it “had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love, and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it…” (O’Brien 228). Tim …show more content…
The authors’ depiction of the treatment of women is not pretty, it is not dressed up and made to look softer than it truly is. The world is not as innocent as it wishes to pretend women are. These idolized, ideal versions of women are horrible standards for fictional characters to internalize, which is why the fact that these icons are not exclusive to fiction is so horrifying. This phenomenon has continued for too long; it is time for everyone, not just groups of women that are few are far between, to stand up and put a stop to