The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien Essay

the weight of their gear, and the mental stress of their problems and worries thousands of miles across the sea back home along with the horrors of war. “First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.” This shows the reader one of the many things of what runs through the minds of the soldiers and the weight of those burdens on their shoulders. During a combat mission having these worries on one’s mind when in a firefight…

In the excerpt from The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien effectively develops his philosophy that a soldier carries pride, and that they also hold the burden to do terrible things to others for justice and most of all they have to experience terrible things. through his creative use of a variety of syntax techniques. One such technique is his use of polysyndeton. . He writes, “War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling, war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.” The effect of…

Precis The book I read for my Precis was The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. The book was published on March 28, 1990. This book is a collection of short stories following an American platoon during the Vietnam War that lasted from 1955 to 1975. The text was written after the war and is O’Brian telling about his platoon and his experience. The text is broken into many different short stories, beginning with the things his platoon physically carried along with the emotional baggage they had…

In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the concept of truth is developed and bent and flipped in on itself over and over, especially in “How to Tell a True War Story.” In this chapter, O’Brien sets abstract definitions to the seemingly concrete idea of truth. These definitions of a “true war story,” as convoluted and contradictory as they seem, all ultimately prove to be true, just as all versions of a story are true because the story changes as the emotions that drive it change. In the end,…

Continuing the pattern that appears earlier in the chapter, O’Brien describes the pressure the soldiers feel to not show signs of weakness and to remain as tough as nails in terms of a physical weight that needs to be lugged around: “They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing…was what had brought them to the war in the first place” (O’Brien 20). It is notable that the “greatest fear” is not in fact that of dying or being injured or witnessing…

The book The Things They Carried is based off a semi-true story about american soldiers that were in the Vietnam war. There are many scenes in the book about these soldiers walking in the woods, spending time at their camp, and sometimes on battle ground. The main characters in this book were made up, but in the front of the book there is a dedication for these fictional character. The characters are, Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa. The book…

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is a war story. It tells about the physical and not so physical things that his friends and himself bared during the Vietnam War. This book portrays how these things weighted or lightened their load and how it impacted their time in Vietnam. Throughout the story O’Brien contradicts himself multiple times, making it difficult to separate fact and fiction. Just about everyone that has or will read this book will surely be confused, but pay close enough…

lives by symbolizing their weaknesses and strengths. In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien emphasizes the impact that women have on him, along with the tough, courageous, and brave men in the novel. He focuses on the emotions, attitudes, and different perspectives that the men, including himself, experience when in contact with the women who are important in their lives. Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, displays the importance of women, such as Martha, Kathleen, and Mary…

to seeing. They are no longer near home where they live, their lives with Moon Pie and Tom. The only things they have are the memories of them. It causes a cultural shock because they aren’t seeing Moon Pie and Tom as often as they used to. It is the same feeling a soldier gets when he goes to war. They have to adapt to a new environment and abandon their everyday life, not to mention the things they care about the most. Soldiers only have the memories of what they love the most just like Sam…

that concept, Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” focuses on a platoon of soldiers during the Vietnam war trying to mentally evade the hardships of war and slip into a coma of tranquility through objects they carried. The weight these soldiers carried were described individually by the mental, psychological and physical weight. Within the weight lies a symbolic meaning that reflects the lives of the soldiers outside of wartime. In Tim O'Brien's short story, “The Things They Carried”, he…