American Culture In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

“Over 20 years, more than 58,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam and more than 150,000 wounded, not to mention the emotional toll the war took on American culture.” (Blake 1 ) In Tim O’Brien’s novel “The Things They Carried” death was a daily occurrence, on both the American and the Vietnamese side. O’Brien writes about the function of memory, traditions of war literature and the difference between Tim as a soldier and Tim as a writer. Tim O 'Brien 's novel “The Things They Carried” is written in multiple points of views all which are scattered kind of like the function of memory, no one remembers their whole life story perfectly. O 'Brien is no different he tells many stories but he only remembers the big details, while telling a story …show more content…
O’Brien writes about the function of memory, traditions of war literature and the difference between Tim as a soldier and Tim as a …show more content…
O 'Brien is no different he tells many stories but he only remembers the big details, while telling a story he might go back and drop a fact he might have forgotten. According to Tim O’Brien remembering the past is important he cannot move on until he comes to terms with his past, it 's shaped him into who is. O’Brien states in the following passage “But the thing about remembering is that you don 't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets.” (O’Brien 33). Tim O’Brien agrees more with Linda’s version of endings than Kathleen’s because kathleen is a bit young and navie, she doesn’t understand the harsh reality of