"The dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world" (O'Brien). Tim O'Brien has a way of using his stories to bring the dead back to life. O'Brien's purpose in putting this line at the beginning of the story was to give it a summary of what the story is going to look like. Just because a person is physically dead doesn't really make them dead, the only way in keeping that person alive is by keeping the memories alive. Which is what O'Brien did with Linda by dreaming of her every time he went to sleep to remember what it was to feel her presence near him. The title "The lives of the dead" is a contradiction because the dead doesn't have lives. Theme's that O'Brien uses in this story is dreaming and hallucination. Throughout
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Causing them to hallucinate and to have upsetting memories. Proving that maybe O'Brien is just traumatized by the things he's experienced while being over there, losing his close friends and to top it off losing the girl he loved at just 9 years old. When you fall in love with someone and lose them you experience love and death all together and that’s when O'Brien experienced death for the very first time. Most of this story takes place during the Vietnam war in Vietnam shaping the mood and tone of the …show more content…
It mentions how Tim O'Brien is obsessed in telling a true war story, and it's true. In the book "The lives of the dead" he never talks about how to recover from war instead he builds the characters to live with the fact that this is their lives. Going back to the story he wrote, "The things they carried" he mentions in detail everything the soldiers carried with them to keep sane. Which is how the soldiers live with being in Vietnam, by accepting the fact that they are there and that it wasn't going to change. With Ted Lavender and his drug usage to escape reality, the constant reminders of the love of Timmy and Linda and Kiowa carrying the new testament because it brought the thought of his father closer to him. The author makes sure to mention these things in the story to show the reader that in an average person's life, the things that seem that are the end of the world isn't as bad as it seems until you see through the eyes of someone in deeper struggle. Soldiers have no one but each other which shows another theme that the author uses in this story. Trust and
Causing them to hallucinate and to have upsetting memories. Proving that maybe O'Brien is just traumatized by the things he's experienced while being over there, losing his close friends and to top it off losing the girl he loved at just 9 years old. When you fall in love with someone and lose them you experience love and death all together and that’s when O'Brien experienced death for the very first time. Most of this story takes place during the Vietnam war in Vietnam shaping the mood and tone of the …show more content…
It mentions how Tim O'Brien is obsessed in telling a true war story, and it's true. In the book "The lives of the dead" he never talks about how to recover from war instead he builds the characters to live with the fact that this is their lives. Going back to the story he wrote, "The things they carried" he mentions in detail everything the soldiers carried with them to keep sane. Which is how the soldiers live with being in Vietnam, by accepting the fact that they are there and that it wasn't going to change. With Ted Lavender and his drug usage to escape reality, the constant reminders of the love of Timmy and Linda and Kiowa carrying the new testament because it brought the thought of his father closer to him. The author makes sure to mention these things in the story to show the reader that in an average person's life, the things that seem that are the end of the world isn't as bad as it seems until you see through the eyes of someone in deeper struggle. Soldiers have no one but each other which shows another theme that the author uses in this story. Trust and