Literary Elements In The Things They Carried

The novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien had many themes throughout the story. The most outstanding theme was the effects the war had on people. The people in the book changed in many different ways because of the war. O’Brien uses literary devices, and literary elements in the Things They Carried to emphasize the effects that the war had on the soldiers. First of all, by expressing how O’Brien and his group of soldiers changed through the war he used many literary devices, such as anaphora. One example of O’Brien using anaphora in his novel is “Forty three years ago, and the war occurred a half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will sometimes lead to a story, which makes it forever… Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how to where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember but the story.” (pg.40). Anaphora is used in this paragraph to express the word “stories” to show that when you have nothing left in this …show more content…
In The Things They Carried "They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing" (pg.20) throughout the war. The soldiers were scared to lose each other because that was all they had throughout the entire war. That is an effect war can do to the soldiers, they will be terrified to lose each other, and they would have dreams of their men dying right before their eyes. O’Brien experienced many things when he went to war, he saw many things and did things that no one should do. He had problems sleeping at night because he would dream things that occurred in the