The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien Essay

these items weighed between 12-18 pounds…”. (O’Brien). That wasn’t even all. It was SOP get rid of this O’Brien says it was SOP* to “carry a steel-centered nylon-covered flak jacket.” and “steel helmets that weighed 5 pounds”, along with a 2 pound poncho. (O’Brien). The story gives readers an idea and a sense of what it was like to carry all of the things that they carried as soldiers. He gives the reader the exact weight of everything that was carried. This is important because, this could’ve…

an unavoidable part of life. Change comes in all different ‘shapes and sizes’, It can be physical or mental. We have observed change in many of the books we read this year. Some of those books include; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Things They Carried, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Change in those books are all very different from each other, but that doesn’t change the severity of the change. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, we see Huck, a young boy that…

In an article written by Lori Daniels, James Boehnlein, and Phillip McCallion about post-traumatic stress disorder, the practice of life review has shown to significantly lower post-traumatic stress disorder among aging veterans suffering from the mental disability. Awareness of this disorder has gradually increased since veterans returned from the Vietnam War, but there has yet to be a breakthrough in how to properly treat post-traumatic stress disorder. The authors state that the effects of…

the reader. This violence is not always limited to battles. One particularly vicious scene in The Things They Carried is when Curt Lemon is killed and in retaliation, Rat Kiley, his best friend, viciously kills a baby water buffalo (75-76). Regardless of the fact that this novel is essentially a war story, these moments are pivotal and further develop the humanity of soldiers in Vietnam. Tim O’Brien uses…

underlying truths will always be the same. In The Things They Carried, different perceptions are certainly present, but the underlying messages of the stories are what make the book true. Though being a “work of fiction” may imply that the stories like Sweetheart of the Song…

“The Things They Carried” demonstrates the effects of war to someone both physically and mentally. The story takes place with O’Brien and Alpha company during the Vietnam war. He goes through and tell the reader what each character is carrying and also helps shed some light on each character's conscious thought. Some characters who dealt with these mental struggles really show to the reader some of Freud and Jung’s theories. These examples are Freud’s theory on a person's shadow, and Jung’s…

through that, one may also learn to love and allow others to love him or her. Love is a special bond that makes life more enjoyable because an individual is able to share the joys and burdens of life with someone else. Tim O 'Brien 's novel The Things They Carried is a reflection of O’Brien himself, who was once a soldier, and he talks about the realities of war and how they have affected him. It is through storytelling that…

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien “In war, truth is the first casualty”. These words by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus show how the nature of war hasn’t changed in the last two thousand years. During times of War truth gets very muddy and hard to understand, it becomes hard to separate what really happened to what seems to have happened. Ambiguity is the common denominator of every War. “The Things They Carried” is a book about the Vietnam War, but it is also a book about Storytelling itself…

most heroes wouldn’t have. They have the goals or desires that a hero has, but the way they go about achieving them may be in an unheroic way. Just a few books that contain this character style include The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Things They Carried, Catch 22, and The Great Gatsby.…

Tim O'Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, eloquently (NR) demonstrates the theme of ‘beauty in horror’. The novel emphasizes this theme through the underlying foil between beauty and atrocities that are not uncommon in war stories. O'Brien focuses on the imagery of these events as well as the tone to illustrate the difficulties that soldiers are exposed to and how they have been conditioned to their situation to no longer see the horror in these horrific events rather start seeing them as…