The Things Men Do Critical Analysis

Lorrie Smith, in her writing if “The Things Men Do”, makes the claim that Tim O’Brien was exclusionary to women with his writing of The Things They Carried. She oftentimes makes statements that suggest that O’Brien is in pursuit of strengthening the bonds between male characters in the novel, therefore alienating the female reader. Smith makes the argument that O’Brien continually tries to uphold gender norms from the unprogressive past. Lorrie Smith claims that Tim O’Brien limits the “agency and sensibility” of the female characters within the novel, leaving them to be bystanders who are not supposed to be able to understand the complexity of war and the infinitive masculinity that lies within it; more accurately though, O’Brien uses both male and female characters to pronounce the effects of war and communicate the effects of storytelling. Lorrie Smith contests that the narrator’s fictional ten year-old daughter, Kathleen, is eloquently placed in the novel to outline the gorge-like disconnect between men, who experienced the Vietnam War, and women and children, who were not there. In The Things They Carried, the narrator does not share his experiences and war …show more content…
Other soldiers in the novel carried around pictures of girls they loved back home. This serves as evidence that these men, American soldiers in Vietnam, were not trying to exclude women from their war experience, yet the soldiers were seemingly attempting to bring women with them.
Lorrie Smith argues that Tim O’Brien pushes the theme of a gendered war; one that oppresses femininity among the characters in The Things They Carried. Smith believes that Tim O’Brien made a concerted effort to silence the womanly character about the effect that the war had on her. However, a female character, a girl named Mary Anne, exemplifies quite the display of female independence in the story, “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra