Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

American culture often associates war stories with masculinity (Boyle, 2011). However, the Vietnam War affected a wide variety of people: American men, who served in combat, American women, who served as nurses, as well as the Vietnamese, who lived in the area and saw the effects of war every day (Kazemek, 1998). Reflecting this is a growing body of work that adopts alternative perspectives to tell war stories (i.e. nurse, child) (Kazemek, 1998). Tim O’Brien, in his The Things They Carried, describes the Vietnam war through the traditional perspective of a combat male, he represents Martha, Mary Anne Bell, and women in general as taboo or dislikeable objects (Barden, 2010). Martha, Lieutenant Cross’s girlfriend, is labeled negatively in the novel via the obsession with her virginity and purity (Smith, 1994). She then becomes a taboo subject when Lieutenant Cross becomes so distracted by his obsession with her virginity and purity that he allows Ted Lavender to die. She is blamed for Lavender’s death by Cross directly when he burns the letters and photographs she has sent him, and she becomes an object of Cross’s hate (O’Brien, 1990, 23-24). This negative …show more content…
For example, Bob “Rat” Kiley writes a heartfelt letter after Curt Lemon’s death to Lemon’s sister explaining “how her brother would volunteer for stuff nobody else would volunteer for... [how he was] a great, great guy… you could trust him with your life.” (O’Brien, 67). This act of kindness on Rat’s part is met with absense - “‘I write this beautiful fuckin’ letter, I slave over it, and what happens? The dumb cooze never writes back.” (O’Brien, 69). Many times throughout the novel, women are referenced to as cooze or animal. This objectification of women, represents the overall attitude towards women in the novel, one of general sexulization and dislike, and shows their lower place in society and war time