What A Soldier Carries Nowadays very few authors of fictional writings decide to use the mixture of fact and fiction in order to demonstrate the main ideas and themes of their writings. In the fictional novel The Things They Carried written by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien used the mixture of fact and fiction to demonstrate what the soldiers had to carry in and after the Vietnam War, and how these things affected their actions. The Things They Carried is a two hundred thirty three page novel that greatly depicts the physical and mental things the soldiers had to carry during and after the Vietnam War through the use of multiple short stories about different soldiers in the war. Each one of the twenty two short stories concentrated on different aspects,
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The main character in the novel was O’Brien, and he eventually had an encounter with someone’s death, which had changed his demeanor for the rest of the novel. A symbolic aesthetic was written by an author by the name of Koki Nomura, and within the aesthetic was a line that read “throughout the story, guilt-ridden Tim is sitting on the ground and staring at the body of a young Vietnamese soldier lying on the trail, a soldier, he has just ambushed and killed with a hand grenade”(Nomura 88). Any soldier can tell you, that some of the things they do are things that no human hopes to ever encounter in their lifetime. Through the use of this line, Nomura talks about O’Brien’s encounters with guilt, killing, and death. This is used to demonstrate how O’Brien is no different than any other soldier, and about how it may have been a trigger for writing this novel about his past experiences with the war. Being that these men are at the age where their brains are developing and their lives are starting to peak, they are prone to feelings of guilt. The soldiers felt these feelings of guilt for things that they could never have changed, or even after doing what they were trained to do. Guilt is sadly just one of the many emotions that these men suffered from. War is a …show more content…
Since these soldiers are usually anywhere from eighteen to twenty one years old, they have to encounter and react to killings, emotional tolls, and deadly situations every day that they are fighting overseas. On top of them dealing with these physical and mental tolls that comes from the war, they are required to carry massive amounts of equipment that causes them to feel uncomfortable and fatigued. The soldiers involved in the Vietnam War and depicted in the novel took emotional tolls that consisted of guilt, brotherhood, and sympathy while fighting in the
The main character in the novel was O’Brien, and he eventually had an encounter with someone’s death, which had changed his demeanor for the rest of the novel. A symbolic aesthetic was written by an author by the name of Koki Nomura, and within the aesthetic was a line that read “throughout the story, guilt-ridden Tim is sitting on the ground and staring at the body of a young Vietnamese soldier lying on the trail, a soldier, he has just ambushed and killed with a hand grenade”(Nomura 88). Any soldier can tell you, that some of the things they do are things that no human hopes to ever encounter in their lifetime. Through the use of this line, Nomura talks about O’Brien’s encounters with guilt, killing, and death. This is used to demonstrate how O’Brien is no different than any other soldier, and about how it may have been a trigger for writing this novel about his past experiences with the war. Being that these men are at the age where their brains are developing and their lives are starting to peak, they are prone to feelings of guilt. The soldiers felt these feelings of guilt for things that they could never have changed, or even after doing what they were trained to do. Guilt is sadly just one of the many emotions that these men suffered from. War is a …show more content…
Since these soldiers are usually anywhere from eighteen to twenty one years old, they have to encounter and react to killings, emotional tolls, and deadly situations every day that they are fighting overseas. On top of them dealing with these physical and mental tolls that comes from the war, they are required to carry massive amounts of equipment that causes them to feel uncomfortable and fatigued. The soldiers involved in the Vietnam War and depicted in the novel took emotional tolls that consisted of guilt, brotherhood, and sympathy while fighting in the