The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien Essay

“I never noticed people who talk a lot about duty find it much of a trouble to them” (56) In war, there are responsibilities: we have to protect, serve, and look out for each other. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Frank O’Conner’s Guests of the Nation both have settings take place during war time. Some aspects of war make them different. However, the aspect of duty is found in both stories. In war, it doesn’t matter who or what is coming, you look out for your fellow solider and defeat…

The book “The Things They Carried” helped me sharpened my “humane imagination” because it made me realize about the importance of background before doing something, the respect of different ideologies of others, and also the importance of self esteem and not do something based on others. Even though the situations in the book are from a war, most of the stuff can be related to daily life and after reading this book my opinion about values, feelings, and thoughts about others changed. A way in…

In Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, he shows the struggles that American soldiers’ experience in the Vietnam war. In one of the short stories the “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” one of the soldiers, Mark Fossie, brings over Mary Anne Bell, his high school sweetheart, from back home. She quickly becomes curious about her surroundings in a foreign country far from home and what occurs around them in Vietnam, where she learns of the power and destruction of war. Mary Anne Bell…

not. As regular civilians we don’t get to know what actually is going on and why were in conflicts with foreign countries. Fictional literature is one of the only things we have that gives us deeper meaning in events that we usually don’t get to learn about. It takes us to another world where were invited to learn new about new things that the regular world can’t teach us. Fiction gives us different views on life and more analysis on the characters feelings and emotions. A fictional book could…

The Things They Carried: A Psychoanalytic Study The Things They Carried was published in 1990 by Tim O’Brien, approximately fifteen years after the United States departed from South Vietnam and twenty years after O’Brien left. Although at the time of publishment O’Brien hadn’t been in Vietnam for nearly two decades, the memories and stories he depicts within his novel are fresh and filled with colorful dialogue. The Things They Carried allows readers to view a minuscule portion of the brutality…

the guilt that they have. In Horner’s article he talks about how O’Brien does not know whether he should go to the war that he does not believe in. “this ‘moral split’, he explains, caused him to experience “a kind of schizophrenia” even to the degree of hallucinating faces and voices of his [O’Brien] parents”(Horner 262). Having the authority to chose to be brave or to be a coward caused him to hallucinate.The hallucinations O’Brien…

In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien gives an insight of the Vietnam war through a collection of short stories. In these short stories, he explains his journey as a young soldier and the others soldiers about the hardships they had to go through during and after the war. To begin with, O’ Brien lists all the tangible items the soldiers have brought to the war with them and how those items are going to positively contribute to the soldier’s lives during the groundbreaking war. In particular,…

secrets buried in their past that can cause internal conflicts within themselves, not unlike Rolf Carle. Along the same lines, “The Things They Carried,” “And of Clay Are We Created”, and “A Kind of Murder” bear similar internal conflicts, nevertheless the authors create their own unique exclusive situations and conditions. “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien is a beautiful story about First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’ internal struggle caused by his inability to move forward,…

they think for whatever reason that they could have prevented the death. In most cases there is no one to blame, but people blame themselves to make there be a reason for his/her death and it is a way of coping with it. In the book, Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, a question that is being asked amongst the soldiers is who’s fault is it? I believe that in war it is always the leader's fault for someone’s death. They are his men, and his responsibility. Therefore, in the book Jimmy Cross is to…

and responses wired into them by horror. Few others understand how hard this work can be” (Paxson). The PTSD symptoms are displayed through the drastic effects they have on the everyday life of a war veteran. The Things They Carried, a collection of short stories written by Tim O’Brien, encapsulates moments of the PTSD soldiers suffer from. Literary work and other sources sanction society to see all the negative attributes of PTSD. Therefore, making PTSD the primary and most significant effect…