Tim O 'Brien's The Things They Carried'

The Things They Carried Analysis
One of Tim O'Brien’s stories is called “The Things They Carried”. The story handled many characters and things that contain images and messages to tell. The story is about a group of soldiers during the Vietnam War. Every one of those soldiers carried a piece of memory as a souvenir. These memories had a related to solder past life. In the end, some of the memories would be changed from being a physical material to be psychological images. Ultimately, soldiers would realize the reality of the war. Through this story, there are some points would be analyzed such as symbolism, the significant moments, and the theme.
There are a lot of symbolic things that are carried in the story. Since the story described a set of items carried by soldiers, each item symbolizes soldiers’ personalities and their past life. For example, Ted Lavender was a young soldier. He carried tranquilizers and use drag most of the time. Tranquilizers sign to the desire of forgetting …show more content…
Ted Lavender's death shocked the soldiers. They found themselves with nothing except their burden and their friend body. Their seating around the fire after Lavender's death and smoking his drugs tells about the pain inside each one of them. That moment explains how much each soldier knew that he might be the next in the deadline. They had nothing to do except waiting and fighting. The war took the happy memories of soldiers to give them the fear and sadness moments. Their love, life, family, and friends were not true in the front of the war. Actually, when Tim O'Brien said “They made themselves laugh”, he was described the soul of the soldiers which was suffering inside themselves. Their laughing was a mask to hide a lot of tears behind it. The word” made” mentioned to tell that soldiers created the laugh not found