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Craftsmanship In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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Craftsmanship of A Story
During the 1917 October Revolution, Russia gave way to the Marxist Party in less than twenty-four hours. Russian citizens were dramatically affected by the overthrow, and it rippled throughout the world from Vietnam to Cuba to China as nations feared communism’s policies, its threat to sovereignty and to national security. In retaliation, wars waged and hostility grew. Fifty years after the October Revolution, the United States entered into a controversial war alleging to defend democracy. This war lead to conflict, violent protests, hostility, and a generation who questioned the military. Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, captures these emotion as he recounts the Vietnam War through a collection of linked …show more content…

His stories are not political, and he explains his intent is not to teach a lesson, “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done” (O’ Brien 65). Rather, O’Brien’s focus is centered on the characters’ lives, the relationships formed, and the how his friends and others reacted, responded and survived the war. O’Brien refrains from judgement, even when characters’ actions seem questionable. For example, when Rat Kiley, the platoon’s medic, shot himself in the foot in order to get medevaced, O’Brien depicts the situation honestly and …show more content…

Instead, he denounces the traditional, dominant war story narrative. Brutal details, according to O’Brien, are necessary, “You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come back talking dirty” (66). O’Brien essentially challenges and warns the reader by suggesting they must be prepared for reality. The soldiers’ experiences serve as a coping mechanism and as a way to honor the men who served. One of these men, Norman Bowker, who was struggling with Kiowa’s death and its affect on him, asked O’Brien to write a story about it. As O’Brien contemplates the memories and the task of depicting this event, he wavers between the significance of writing the factual or the emotional truth, “By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate if from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by investing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain”(152). O’Brien admits how hard it was to truthfully write Kiowa’s story. The guilt and pain he felt as a friend of both men, and the responsibility he felt to write the story as Bowker asked, challenged O’Brien to include

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(O’Brien 107). The quote was significant at the time that Tim O'Brian was attempting to talk to Norman Bowker about his guilt over the death of Kiowa and to stop him from believing that he needed to continue telling war stories after the war. The letter O'Brien received from Bowker vividly depicts his struggles with depression and traumatic events. This demonstrates how the author is attempting to deal with the traumatic events from his time serving in the Vietnam War. Because this was the first war that America lost and because it can be used to illustrate how people suffered, it demonstrates how difficult it is for soldiers to talk about their experiences.

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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.

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1230 Words | 5 Pages

In the book, the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story” sheds light on his aim; this is where O’Brien wrote that it is not hard to tell a “true” war story, all a writer needs to do is add something embarrassing that “happened” to him/her, and people will think it's true. O’Brien shares this idea because if a writer admits

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O'Brien emphasizes the difference between the troops' actual experiences and how those experiences are portrayed in the society and by the government throughout the entire story. He discusses how soldiers are taught to "spin" their perspectives in order to make them more appealing to the American public, frequently by praising their own bravery and understating the atrocities of war. He explains how soldiers can eventually have feelings of remorse and shame due to their sensitivity to violence and

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1185 Words | 5 Pages

It was hard stuff to write. Kiowa, after all, had been a close friend, and for years I’ve avoided thinking about his death and my own complicity in it. Even here it’s not easy,” (94). O’Brien made sure that he revised the story. He wrote the whole thing, without telling a lie.

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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.

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Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are". (O'Brien 38) O’Brien uses his stories to reach his audience. There are generations of people who have no clue what war is really like, whether it is because of our misconceptions based on what media portrays or the fact that there are people who have not served in the military. Some people might know about Vietnam and know the outcome of the war, but they don’t have the experience and real life understanding of how that story ended. They might not be able to fully understand the feelings of a soldier.

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1470 Words | 6 Pages

In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien we learn about O’Brien and his soldiers during the Vietnamese war. The Vietnamese war was a deadly and very costly war between the North Vietnam and their communist allies versus the Southern Vietnam and the United states. Throughout the novel Tim O’Brien narrates many stories about the war. Stories about traumatic incidents, pleasant occasions, sorrowful events, and even peculiar event. Personal accounts about himself and also tells about experiences his fellow soldiers faced.

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A solder’s story “The Things They Carried,” written by Timothy O’Brien and based on his own Vietnam experiences, features Tim O'Brien as the main protagonist who is a soldier fighting in the Vietnam War. “The Things They Carried” is a number of interrelated lyrical stories that has been declared as one of the best narrations about the Vietnam War. O'Brien proceeds to describe the things that his fellow soldiers carried on their missions, which included physical objects in addition to other intangible objects like fear or guilt. O'Brien explains the chronological order of the events that led to his decision to go to Vietnam despite his initial resistance to joining the war. O'Brien narrates various other accounts about the pre and post-war

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886 Words | 4 Pages

O’Brien goes into great depth in this small quote on how loss of innocence and war can affect people in the war. The quote “Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t” shows how war is so different from what any human experiences at home. After that small quote he follows it up by bringing up how you have to use normal stuff to show how crazy these things are and how much of a pole it can have on somebody during a war. The way that war is treated for many is mostly the mental part that is struggling. But for many "War is hell, but that's not half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love.

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In November of 1955, the United States entered arguably one of the most horrific and violent wars in history. The Vietnam War is documented as having claimed about 58,000 American lives and more than 3 million Vietnamese lives. Soldiers and innocent civilians alike were brutally slain and tortured. The atrocities of such a war are near incomprehensible to those who didn’t experience it firsthand. For this reason, Tim O’Brien, Vietnam War veteran, tries to bring to light the true horrors of war in his fiction novel The Things They Carried.

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1284 Words | 6 Pages

Tim O’Brien never lies. While we realise at the end of the book that Kiowa, Mitchell Sanders and Rat Kiley are all fictional characters, O’Brien is actually trying to tell us that there is a lot more truth hidden in these imagined characters than we think. This suggests that the experiences he went through were so traumatic, the only way to describe it was through the projection of fictional characters. O’Brien explores the relationship between war experiences and storytelling by blurring the lines between truth and fiction. While storytelling can change and shape a reader’s opinions and perspective, it might also be the closest in helping O’Brien cope with the complexity of war experiences, where the concepts like moral and immorality are being distorted.

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Hidden somewhere within the blurred lines of fiction and reality, lies a great war story trapped in the mind of a veteran. On a day to day basis, most are not willing to murder someone, but in the Vietnam War, America’s youth population was forced to after being pulled in by the draft. Author Tim O’Brien expertly blends the lines between fiction, reality, and their effects on psychological viewpoints in the series of short stories embedded within his novel, The Things They Carried. He forces the reader to rethink the purpose of storytelling and breaks down not only what it means to be human, but how mortality and experience influence the way we see our world. In general, he attempts to question why we choose to tell the stories in the way

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688 Words | 3 Pages

“That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future ... Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story” (36). The Things They Carried is a captivating novel that gives an inside look at the life of a soldier in the Vietnam War through the personal stories of the author, Tim O’Brien . Having been in the middle of war, O’Brien has personal experiences to back up his opinion about the war.

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499 Words | 2 Pages

The story of the shit field keeps on being told, O'Brien does not stop talking about it in the book. O'Brien says that if a story keeps on coming back, it might show that it is a true war story, "You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end," (72). PTSD, the effects of the story do not lessen. So it's always replaying in the mind. Like the person would never forget that one story, because he knows that it was his fault and it haunts him.

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