The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien Essay

The Things They Carried is a collection of short stories by American writer Tim O’Brien. The stories told in the the novel describe how a platoon of men fought in the Vietnam War. Although the stories describe the author’s improvised memories of the Vietnam War, they include female characters that portray a significant part of the novel. Specifically, three females; Martha, Mary and Linda. Martha expresses love and danger; Mary Anne Bell loss of innocence, and Linda memory and death. Despite the…

baby buffalo. None of it happened. None of it” (85). So when a student attempts to capture in one sentence what the work as a whole means, they immediately fail. In one sentence you cannot say what O’Brien intends to accomplish with his work. Unless that sentence is: The meaning of The Things They Carried as a whole is to share a human experience despite whether or not it actually happened. But that could be said for every work ever written. An increase in mathematical and scientific learning…

this ability allows the reader to distinguish what their truth was, and the truth that now remains. Mister. Hawkins, or The American as he is commonly referred to, detests the interrogation process because he does not truly like violence. “He wishes things were less complicated, and he dreads what he knows must follow. He thinks regretfully of what could have happened if the prisoner had given the correct names.” However, even though Mister. Hawkins’ may not condone violence, he is forced to…

person from who they used to be because of the danger and risk to life that they must face every day to survive. In The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, we hear some of the harrowing stories of being a soldier in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam war was the longest war in American History, killing an estimated 60,000 United States soldiers and nearly 2 million Vietnamese. Tim O’Brien served as a foot soldier on the battlefront in Vietnam and lived to write about his experiences which give…

“War is kind”(5 Crane), but then he contradicts himself and talks about things that are bad in war. In “Dulce et Decorum Est”(Owen) the title itself is ironic because it is not sweet or right to die for your country. In Document D, Powers…

study conducted shows that 74% of Vietnam veterans would serve again, even knowing the outcome (Roush). This statistic makes sense, because according to the same report 2/3 of the soldiers were volunteers, not conscripted soldiers. Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, although a fictional book, very accurately depicts the hardships faced on a normal basis by soldiers serving in Vietnam. The author rarely talks about himself during the war in the book. He instead focuses on describing…

Compassion In Tim O’Brien’s, “The Things They Carried”, he introduces his extremely personal story to his readers “On the Rainy River” that he supposedly has never told anyone. With this chapter he is faced with a huge life-changing crisis, he had been drafted to serve in the United States Army to fight in the Vietnam War. O’Brien felt trapped, he was completely opposed to this forced command but there was no way out. He couldn’t even fathom why he would have to risk his life for a war that he…

life-changing experience that can differ from person to person. There are many ways that it can affect an individual, such as how Norman Bowker suffered from depression and excluded himself from society, how Mary Anne Bell became mentally unstable, and how Tim O’Brien learned many life lessons that helped him cope after the war was over. When people return from war, they have difficulty settling back into day-to-day life once they have gotten a taste of the horrors of war. On the other hand,…

Careful analysis of Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” and Harold Moore’s and Joseph Galloway’s “We Were Soldiers Once… And Young” reveals two markedly different portrayals of the United States’ army during the Vietnam War. This change mirrors the dwindling optimism of the American people from Moore and Galloway’s account of the 1965 Battle of la Drang and O’Brien’s more comprehensive account of the later stages of the war and post-war period. While O’Brien, Moore, and Galloway all served…

think that way. Men who were sent over to Vietnam during the war were stripped of their lives and forced to adapt to life under attack. There was nothing to look forward to and the memories and items they cherished began to fade. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and throughout Tom Lehrer’s war stories in Walter A. McDougall’s “The Vietnamization of America,” the idea emerges…