Alienation Of Soldiers In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien chronicles the lives of a group of soldiers in the Vietnam War. One of the major themes in the book is the theme of alienation, which is a very real problem that soldiers, especially soldiers in the time before social media and wireless internet, experienced. On one level it is the experiences that these young men had that they can only share with the men who have been to war themselves, the things that their peers, the people who are not in that war with them could never understand. On another level it is the things that these men could not share even with veterans of other wars, as many of the things they experience have no real allegory to wars that have come before. O’Brien uses changes

In the first chapter, when he is describing the things that the soldiers carry, the third person narration gives the setting a little distance, but alternately brings things closer, as the chapter is not focusing on one person, but on the group. “First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries letters from a girl named Martha… The letters were signed Love Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant” (O’Brien, 1-2). When the book switches to first person, such as in the chapter Love, that outside look at how Jimmy Cross deals with the rejection of the woman whose mostly fictional love carried him through that war, whose letters he carried through his entire tour not only reveals how Jimmy feels, but how the narrator relates to him in that time after the war, when all they have are those shared experiences to bond them together. “Many years after the war Jimmy Cross came to visit me at my home in Massachusetts, and for a full day we drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and talked about everything we had seen and done so long ago, all the things we still carried through our lives” (O’Brien, 26). The experiences they share, however, are so important to their development into actual adults that they have shaped how they see and react to

For Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, the letters he carried from a girl named Martha, who he attended college with before going to war showed quite plainly his isolation from not only her but his men as well. “In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending… At dusk he would carefully return the letters to his rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night.” (O’Brien, 1-2) His love for Martha, however ill-conceived, is another sign. It is a hopeful love, one he knows will probably never be returned, but he has to believe that there is at least something there for him to go back to. The other soldiers carry things from home, all of them for different reasons, but with the same effect. They have these things as a connection to their families, to what they still see as home, but all it really does is reinforce how far away they are, and how they will never be able to connect with their old life in the same way, making interactions with friends and family difficult, and at some times