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The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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The Things They Carried is a book by Tim O’Brien, who appears as a character in this fictional book as a sort of self-insert in this fictional story. The book has 232 pages, and is divided into several unnumbered chapters. It was published in 1990 by Houghton Mufflin, and was printed in the USA. The story goes in a rather confusing and awkward order, rather than telling the story in a linear passage of time, each chapter takes place during a different part of O’Brien’s life. It’s written from O’Brien’s point of view many years after the Vietnam war. The story opens with O’Brien recounting all the things his fellow platoon members brought with them to the field: Lieutenant Cross brings a picture of a girl he loves, Martha. Ted Lavender brings marijuana to help calm his anxiety, …show more content…

Though they plan to get married later, Mary Anne ends up becoming so obsessed and curious with Vietnamese culture that she decides to stay in Vietnam and not marry Fossie. Fossie saw Mary Anne as nothing but one-dimensional whose purpose is only to make him happy, and because of that, she lost interest in him and became interested in other things, and became accepting of Vietnamese culture to the point where she no longer wants anything to do with Fossie. In “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien feels remorse for a small group of Vietnamese soldiers he kills with a grenade. Kiowa tries to comfort him, saying that they would have died anyway, but O’Brien believes that the people he killed were just as innocent as he was, and that they wanted absolutely nothing to do with the war, just like him. He imagines one particular boy as a farmer who came from an honest-living, innocent family, and feels horrible for what he’s done. Azar, who is cruel, jokes about the people he killed, making O’Brien feel

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