The Things They Carried

how the sacrifices a hero makes cause psychological effects. Though there are many types of heroes, I will discuss specifically about military heroes. You will read examples from Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”. These examples will show you the struggle these heroes have to go through. I believe being labeled a hero is not something people ask for when they decide to join the military and it is something society has placed upon the person. In…

Surrealism is like an altered reality. The author can tell a true story but can exaggerate details and parts of the story.There is surrealism in both stories in “The Things they Carried”. surrealism adds details that may not be true. In the story “How to tell a True war Story”the author talks about different war stories that he has seen or heard. He says it is hard to tell a true war story because of all the details that are added. To make a good story surrealism is added to make it a better…

The Things They Carried was a book filled with many different versions of symbolism. One of these symbols, Sh*t Field, has many different meanings. Such as, War in general is terrible, the Guilt suffered after war is toll taking, and its memory is something only the people who experienced it will understand. After the war Norman Bowker cannot stop driving around the lake of his home town, thinking about Kiowa(O’Brien, 131). Kiowa was the most moral person in this story and he ended up drowning…

The Vietnam war is well known in the world for its brutality. And there are an abundance of stories to this day about the war. One of these stories is called The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, give his point of view of the war, as an American soldier. Similarly, another text about the war is called Salem, by Robert Butler, a Vietnamese soldier giving his point of view of the war. Both of these texts explore the ideas that killing someone isn’t easy, even in war, also that war impacts…

A Figure Of OCD In The Things They Carried, O'Brien illustrates obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) through the story of lieutenant Jimmy Cross and Martha. In modern medicine, physiologists define OCD as obsessive and/or compulsive behaviors significantly interfering with a person's daily life; in reality a person spends so much time on their obsessions or compulsions that they neglect their daily life and responsibilities. Also, psychologists assert that people with OCD know that their thoughts…

In The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, Stories focus on the struggles of soldiers during Vietnam. Three different characters have different reasons they are cowards, but each character has one thing in common; each character struggles with their cowardice alone. O’Brien uses each character’s struggle with cowardice to link back to how society expects a man to keep his fears to themselves. The characters who struggle with fear in this story are Tim O’Brien, Norman Bowker, and Jimmy…

They are many themes in the novel The Things They Carried but some major themes are guilt and blame, courage, and innocence. The first theme, guilt and blame, is shown throughout the whole book. In the chapter In The Field, Mitchell Sanders states, “Ten billion places we could've set up last night, the man picks a latrine." (In The Field/pg 158). Mitchell Sanders is blaming Jimmy Cross for the death of Kiowa since he picked the location of where they were going to sleep. In the chapter The Man I…

stories will always vary when they are retold. They may not mean to change their story, or maybe they do, either way no one but they will ever know. Truth is nothing but a subjective idea. Tim O’Brien tells us his definition of truth in The Things They Carried, a novel he wrote which was inspired by his experiences in the Vietnam War. O’Brien’s definition of truth is broken up into two categories, story-truth and happening-truth. Story-truth by O’Brien’s definition, what it feels like happened,…

"The Things They Carried" is a short story written about soldiers' experiences of war in Vietnam. The 'things' the author mentions in the title is both figurative and literal. With this comes burdens kept close both by the soldier and the family. When someone goes off to war, there is trauma everywhere. Obviously, the soldier is highly effected by the circumstances; however, through research, it is seen that perhaps even the family is even more traumatized. Even when we are not at war, military…

Within The Story When faced with trauma, every individual reacts differently and chooses to express their emotions distinctly. This is especially evident in soldiers and how they deal with loss during wartime situations. In his novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien explores different coping mechanisms for those in traumatic situations. O 'Brien explores the various ways with which soldiers cope with wartime experiences such as through social dependency , through denial and through…