The Things They Carried Essay

I take The Things They Carried from my backpack and run my fingers over the slightly crumpled pages. It doesn’t take me long to lose myself; I’m sucked in, broken down, and shot off into the distance by this book of memories. They say the best books tell you what you already know, resonating with your own thoughts and emotions. As I read The Things They Carried on the train to Shanghai, it is as if the tempest of my thoughts has become…

The first chapter that could be applied to The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien from How To Read Like A Professor by Thomas C. Foster would be Chapter 11: … More Than It’s Gonna Hurt You: Concerning Violence. For the most part, violence and death are everywhere in The Things They Carried. Explosions, gun shots, open wounds, all in a typical war setting that was fought by people who did not even need to be in the war. “By daylight they took sniper fire, at night they were mortared, but it was…

The Things They Carried is a collection of stories that Tim O’Brien the author of the novel uses to portray his experiences and feelings throughout the Vietnam War. This book conveys the life of the men throughout the war and post war and shares his vivid experiences as if you were almost there. O’Brien not only tells the cruel part of his experiences but the love and sacrifice that bonded the soldiers to form a sense of brotherhood. In the Book The Thing They Carried, O’Brien conveys bonds…

Tim O'Brien uses various types of rhetoric to introduce and familiarize the hardships and travesties of war with those who have never experienced it in his novel The Things They Carried. Bringing new light and perspective to a story told before, O’Brien uses his narrator, the flexibility of truth, and repetition to assist his story telling. In the beginning of the novel, we are introduced to a character named Tim O'Brien, sculpted from O’Brien’s personal experience as a Vietnam veteran…

in “All Quiet On The Western Front” and “The Things They Carried” one must separate fact from fiction. In “The Things They Carried” a character said, “If you don't care for obscenity then you don't care for the truth.” which goes back to what was said earlier about not censoring any parts of life so that the truth can be seen. In “All Quiet On The Western Front” this is shown by going into detail about the harshness that war can…

War and religion. While in many cases, churches and other holy sites are often used as a way for people to avoid the violence of warfare, in cases such as the Crusades, religion can be the cause of warfare. The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, does not explicitly focus on themes relating to the nature of the relationship between religion and war, rather it focuses mainly on other large ideas such as burdens and subjective truths. However, several symbols presented in some of the many…

Imagine if you were one of the many people who was forced to go to war after graduating your high school career. In the novel, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, he explains the experiences in Vietnam through the actions of soldiers in the book. Bravery and death were themes shown throughout the book because O’Brien focuses on the behaviors of the soldiers’ living in fear. Both themes makes a connection when the soldiers had to prove they’re courageous to fight in the war while other…

The Vietnam War was considerably much more than American soldiers going out in combat to fight the enemy, but rather a mental warfare fighting themselves. Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried” is an American classic that conveys the physical things the soldiers were carrying while also expressing the mental burdens they carry during the Vietnam War. First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, like many other soldiers, long for the love from the ones they left back home. Cross yearns for one girl…

The Things They Carried In the classic novel, The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien illustrates the gruesome details of a dead soldier to develop the speaker’s negative attitude towards the traumatizing effects of war. He provides a detailed description of the soldier as well as a made-up backstory to further enhance the effect. The speaker believes that his death is unnecessary, a waste of life, and not detrimental to the outcome of the war. In the passage, the speaker’s attitude is…

Examining the Importance of Death in “The Things They Carried” The longest war in American history, the Vietnam War, lasted from 1954-1973 and was a horrific and cold war, resulting in a total death toll ranging from 1.3 million casualties to 3.9 million (Bia 1). In just the United States alone, 58,220 total casualties are recorded, with 47,434 of them considered ‘hostile deaths’ (DCAS 1). Vietnam War veteran and American novelist Tim O’Brien, in The Things They Carried, examines the varying…