Complexity Of War In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

Complexity of War The war will never end for the soldiers that are living because they carry the weight of the ones they lost and the parts they lost themselves. In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’brien, readers experience the war through his eyes and his descriptions of what he saw and what he heard and how it left some scars that are hard to bear. Through these descriptions O’Brien shows how the characters in The Thing They Carried have less and less of a sense of humanity the longer they’re in the war and the guilt they feel when they realize they are losing their sense of humanity. The jungle consumes the mind, body, and the soul of the invaders and causes more damage than bullets do. As time passes and the time the foreigners spend in the jungle, the jungle seems to become apart of them; almost as if they disappear. “They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer

The feelings for revenge and wrong doing don't go away until the mind gets what it wants. “He made a short low cry------not even a cry really, just a short lung-and-throat bark----and there was a blurred sequence he lunged sideways and rolled toward a heap of sandbags and crouched there and hugged his rifle and waited. “There,” I whispered. “Now you know” (O’brien 200). His hate for the medic consumed him and he couldn't forget how Bobby left him for 10 minutes and the thoughts of revenge consumed him so much his mind was not satisfied until he made him feel the the same thing he felt. His thoughts on the event wouldn’t leave. He ultimately ended up haunted by the guilt and shame he felt for the actions he committed towards the medic, and they still bother him