The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien Essay

violence. One can either view violence as something that is necessary, or one can detest violence with a burning passion. People who insist that violence is necessary in order to move forward, view it as a sort of tool to help push the natural order of things. For those who see violence as a cowardly tactic to control people, violence is a useless display of power and dominance. Yet violence has also been a way to defend oneself from people who pose a threat. This begs the question; at what…

Out of his whole day, he only spent thirty minutes for "Baseball and sports” as fun (301). Similarly, The Things They Carried shows that O’Brien and other infantrymen prepared for war by making available their personal effects and the weapons of war. Through strategic planning, which is a systematic process of visualizing the desired future, and transforming the visualization…

Martha's Role Tim O'Brien's short story, "The Things They Carried," is based on the life of soldiers in the Vietnam War era. The character Lieutenant Jimmy Cross in the short story is the one responsible for an entire group of soldiers during the war. Lieutenant Cross is fixated on a young woman named Martha who attended Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey to become an English major during this time (pg. 1). Martha, like most women of the soldiers in war, was hope, distraction, and realization…

Have you ever thought of having a good time with family and loved ones, then the next thing is your husband or son receive a call saying they 're going to war, how will you feel? The feeling of confusion and unsure whether they will survive or not, and if there is chance they will return back home and everything will go back to being normal again. Likewise, in the story of “ The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, explains and goes in depth about the struggle and the pain the soldiers go…

truth, if the truth was told in each story every story would be boring and not worth telling. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien have a similar style of expressing their exaggerated war stories with the contex making things up, they also are similar in a thematic way as Slaughterhouse Five and The Things they Carried both show that one may exaggerate a story to emphasize how important the impact was. In Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut the main…

of The Things They Carried and by the name of the chapter one could have guessed that this chapter revolves around the deceased. Most people would honor the fact that the author, Tim O’Brien, talks about keeping the dead alive with stories, but should that be respected? However, although it is good to respect and remember the dead, is it ethical to write about the deceased when they have no say in it or is there a fine line on when you can and when you can’t. In the Things They Carried the…

The book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is full of twists and turns that leave the reader wondering what is true and what is not. His complex writing not only makes one question the truth, but also teaches them about what it is. Through this novel, the author teaches his audience that truth is arbitrary. To support this idea, O’Brien writes about the process and composition of storytelling, explaining that there is a difference between two types of truths which he calls “story-truth” and…

a text or what an author’s intentions were when writing a play, so we have discussions. Shallow depth of field means a single object is in sharp focus, and everything thing not on the same depth level as it become blurry. Shallow fields of view are what allow us to focus on a specific part of a text. In The Things They Carried,…

real, but sometimes it can be hard to tell. Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried shows his and the experiences of many other soldiers in the Vietnam War. He describes all the horrible things they see, what they feel, and the impact of the war on them. Along with the memories of war, he also includes the art of writing and the importance of stories. In some of the chapters, O’Brien even writes about events that never actually happened. According to Tim O’Brien’s criteria, “The Sweetheart…

meaning or to persuade. Rhetorical strategies are found in every piece of writing but we generally do not realize it. In the speeches by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, they use rhetorical strategies to convey their messages. In Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried, rhetorical devices are found throughout his writing. Between these three different texts, rhetorical devices such as similes, personification, irony, and aporia are found throughout their writings as well as others. The authors…