In war, there is no clarity, no sense of definite, everything swirls and mixes together. In Tim O’Brien’s novel named “The Things They Carried”, the author blurs the lines between the concepts like ugliness and beauty to show how the war has the potential to blend even the most contrary concepts into one another. “How to Tell a True War Story” is a chapter where the reader encounters one of the most horrible images and the beautiful descriptions of the nature at the same time. This juxtaposition helps to heighten the blurry lines between concepts during war. War photography has the power to imprint a strong image in the reader’s mind as it captures images from an unimaginable world full of violence, fear and sometimes beauty. Henri Huet, a famous war photographer known for his work in Vietnam War captured a proportionally excellent and appealing photograph during a horrendous operation to illustrate the same blurriness between ugliness and beauty. Both the novel by Tim O’Brien and the photograph by Henri Huet elucidate that besides war’s savage environment, there are also scenes in the nature’s beauty that appeal to eye and look “beautiful”
The photograph named “Vietnam War Paratroopers Rain” by Henri Huet captures a platoon of soldiers who are carrying their weapons above their heads as they are crossing a river during a rainy weather. The rain adds a blurry effect to the photograph that helps to create the illusion of beauty. Misled by the illusion, the viewer’s attention
Joe Rosenthal is a photographer whose photo, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, has become one of the most recognizable photos in American history. It became so famous that it won a Pulitzer Prize the same year it was taken, used to create the Marine Corps War Memorial, and used as the photo for a war-bond poster in 1945 which raised $26 billion (Pulitizer). As such, I argue that this photo illustrates the brutality of the fighting that occurred on not only Iwo Jima, but throughout World War II, and also makes a strong argument for the theory of liberalism. However, first it is important to identify what exactly makes this photo so revered and why it was selected.
Hunter Berman Ms.Silver AP English P-4 6/7/2018 The things They Carried Historical Report The Things They Carried is a novel written by Tim O'Brien about U.S. soldiers stationed in Vietnam and their personal stories of what they literally and emotionally carry. He focus on what the soldiers have on their person and how each of those items have an effect on them for reason specific to them.
A heroic, glorified opportunity to fight for the success of a nation: the common romantic misconception with respect to the true realities of war shared by society. As a fairly new artistic medium during the Civil War, photography allowed for Timothy O’Sullivan and Alexander Gardner to challenge the perception in which the public imagined acts of war by capturing an un-romanticized representation of the horrors of combat in their “Field Where General Reynolds Fell.” But, Gardner enlists artistic elements as well as a narrative caption to lessen the audience’s initial wave of shock by laying burial to the corpses that sacrificed their lives and stirring a sense of resurrection among them. “Field Where General Reynolds Fell,” figure 1, is a
Authors tend to make their opening scene the most important because in all reality it is the first chapter that hooks the reader. To help make this scene the most important, authors add themes and interesting information to convey the reader. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien uses themes such as courage, guilt, and the truth of the war to project his feelings. The significance of the opening scene is used to provide background information about the characters, the war, and the things they carried so that the reader can make connections to the rest of the novel and understand what is going on in later chapters. The Things They Carried has an effective opening scene because it shows what each individual soldier carried and the physical
Readers, especially those reading historical fiction, always crave to find believable stories and realistic characters. Tim O’Brien gives them this in “The Things They Carried.” Like war, people and their stories are often complex. This novel is a collection stories that include these complex characters and their in depth stories, both of which are essential when telling stories of the Vietnam War. Using techniques common to postmodern writers, literary techniques, and a collection of emotional truths, O’Brien helps readers understand a wide perspective from the war, which ultimately makes the fictional stories he tells more believable.
In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the author retells the chilling, and oftentimes gruesome, experiences of the Vietnam war. He utilizes many anecdotes and other rhetorical devices in his stories to paint the image of what war is really like to people who have never experienced it. In the short stories “Spin,” “The Man I Killed,” and “ ,” O’Brien gives reader the perfect understanding of the Vietnam by placing them directly into the war itself. In “Spin,” O’Brien expresses the general theme of war being boring and unpredictable, as well as the soldiers being young and unpredictable.
Literary analysis America’s war heroes all have the same stories to tell but different tales. Prescribed with the same coloring page to fill in, and use their methods and colors to bring the image to life. This is the writing style and tactic used by Tim O’Brien in his novel, “The Things They Carried”. Steven Kaplan’s short story criticism, The Undying Certainty of the Narrator in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, provides the audience with an understanding of O’Brien’s techniques used to share “true war” stories of the Vietnam War. Kaplan explains the multitude of stories shared in each of the individual characters, narration and concepts derived from their personal experiences while serving active combat duty during the Vietnam War,
Although the soldier he killed was an enemy soldier, instead of vilifying him he was able to humanize the man. O’Brien was able to describe the physical appearance of the soldier and imagine her life before war. The author was able to portray an emotional connection and made the line between friend and enemy almost vanish. This was able to reveal the natural beauty of shared humanity even in the context of war’s horror. O’Brien is able to find the beauty in the midst of this tragic and horrible event.
Tim O’Brien and Chris Kyle both use literary devices to contrast two different ideas of war. “There’s no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean.
Right from the first few sentences the author already starts to impress. There is a mix between the writer 's memoir and autobiography. With a memoir a writer will usually recount scenes from his or her own life. The way the writer writes depends on the conditions of the mental and emotional for the writer. When he starts off saying that "this is one story I 've never told before" signals two points to the reader.
Using distinctively visual, sensory language and dramatic devices in texts allows the reader and audience to view as well as participate and relate to different emotions. In the fictional play “Shoe Horn Sonata” written by John Misto, 1995, Misto sets the scene by using dramatic devices to address the extremely confronting circumstances that the protagonists, Sheila and Bridie experience. Similarly, in the poem “Beach Burial” by Kenneth Slessor, 1944, Slessor too uses extremely strong visual language on the subject of war to overcome the gruesome realities of the subject matter. Misto’s play “Shoe Horn Sonata” shares the impacting journey two young women are forced to face, spending 1287 days in captivity in a Sumatran war camp, during world war two.
Surrealism Surrealism is the use of non rational imagery to give insight to the book’s characters’ subconscious thoughts. The Things They Carried specifically references surrealism in “How to Tell a True War Story” and how it is such a big factor in war stories. It is what gives them such unrealistic sounding images and scenes but as Tim O’Brien puts it, “represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed”(68). Surrealism is apparent in many if not all chapters of the story.
“I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to war” (61). A main theme in The Things They Carried is how a man must find a way to overcome fear.
Someone once said, “ Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness [sic] of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along streets, he has done something very like it," ("Matthew Brady Photographer."). The photos showed truth and reality about war. It took away any fantasies about it. Many people would go and see the art galleries.
In the book “The Things They Carried”, Tim O’Brien admits to killing only one man during his war career, and relays it in the chapter “The Man I Killed”. In this chapter, O’Brien surveys the mangled body of the Vietnamese man he has just murdered, and desperately attempts to humanize the dead man as a coping method for his guilt. The chapter embodies a unique, and extremely detailed repetitive writing style which serves as a symbol of O’Brien’s scrutiny over his irrevocable action. The chapter begins with an exceptionally detailed description of the Vietnamese soldier’s body, as O’Brien surveys his destruction.