Psychoanalytic Analysis Of The Things They Carried

The Vietnam War was considerably much more than American soldiers going out in combat to fight the enemy, but rather a mental warfare fighting themselves. Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried” is an American classic that conveys the physical things the soldiers were carrying while also expressing the mental burdens they carry during the Vietnam War. First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, like many other soldiers, long for the love from the ones they left back home. Cross yearns for one girl in particular, Martha, whom he desires, but doubts her having the same feelings for him as he feels for her. Looking further into Cross’s mind from a psychoanalytical view, it’s as if he is mentally incapable of focusing on the war itself without turning the dangerous …show more content…
It can be assumed that a soldier coming home safely from such a war would feel a sense of pride and achievement, but O’Brien felt the utter opposite. Patrick Smith states “Although O’Brien returned to the U.S. as a sergeant with a Purple Heart, the result of a shrapnel wound, he hardly views his actions or those of the American military in Vietnam as heroic.” In his work, O’Brien attempts to adjust the outlook on war by taking his own personal experiences of war and putting them in his short stories. He blurs the line between fact and fiction by placing the fictional characters he creates into the real emotions and events he experienced while in Vietnam (Piedmont-Marton). O’Brien makes his views on the war relatively clear in his writing while also being very blunt in interviews. Aside from his novels and short stories, O’Brien is known not only as a great American writer, but as a great American hero in ways outside of the war. He writes about his experiences and how he personally feels about the Vietnam War with no