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Death In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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Experiencing death affects your mental state vastly, and with this mental alteration, your physical and imaginary world falls behind it. In Tim O’Brien's The Things They Carried, there is a lot of death, including his first love and an old Vietnamese man. These deaths caused many different emotions for O’Brien, including vivid dreams and an almost dead but alive state. O’Brien experiences a lot of death, and this death caused him to almost hallucinate and have very vivid dreams. After O’Brien sees Linda dead, he tells us about how he would dream about Linda, and he starts to think about Linda when she was alive. He would make “up elaborate stories to bring Linda alive in [his] sleep”(O’Brien 230). O’Brien was only young when Linda died, and …show more content…

When O’Brien first joined his platoon, they raided a village, and in that village was a dead old man that they had found. When the platoon passes by the old man “they just grabbed the old man's hand and offered a few words and moved away” (O’Brien 214). By shaking the old mans hand they personify him, making him seem alive, although he is clearly dead. By making him feel like an alive person they are coping with the fact that he was dead because if they thought about everyone being dead when they kill, they would go insane. The way they are talking to him and personifying him is in a way a sort of celebration of life. By talking to a dead person, they are showing how life is created by interaction and thought instead of breathing or still. When O’Brien is asked to go introduce himself to the old man, he refuses despite all the heckling. He later feels “sickness inside [himself], but it wasn't the old man's corpse so much, it was that awesome act of greeting the dead” (O’Brien 215). O’Brien believes that greeting the old man was a sick thing to do, yet he wanted to see Linda and greet her. O’Brien believes greeting the old man was sick because they were the enemy, yet they were being civil once they were dead. In a way, not greeting the old man was a way of showing loyalty and responsibility. At the same time to keep your sanity it is

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He thought about the importance of the human being was violated with the blame on himself. All in all, O’Brien gets all these details from his imagination and from his guilt. After O’Brien killed the man

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In all, people cope with death in many different ways; some make jokes, and some try to keep their spirit alive by telling stories about them by saying what that person used to say. Linda was so important to Timmy because she was his first experience with love, and his first experience with death: “Linda was nine then, as was I, but we were in love. And it was real.

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Death was inevitable in war, and in this war, nearly 2 million people died. In the chapter “The Lives of the Dead” it talks about how Dave Jensen was using his dark humor and poking fun at a dead old man whose arm was blown off. Kiowa, instead wouldn’t join in on the joke because of his strong faith and his morals towards respecting elders. O’Brien also reflects back on when he first experienced the mourning of death. O’Brien’s way of mourning now is the complete opposite of how he did in the past, due to the

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In war, soldiers and civilians will experience the loss of friends and families. In Tim O’Brien’s work, The Things They Carried, the reader is introduced to soldiers fighting in the Vietnam war who lose their comrades’ loves due to mishaps. These soldiers in combat, along with civilians, learn to accept or become numb towards death by understanding the situation they are in and by finding comfort in oblivion. Early in the plot, the reader is made aware of how the soldiers comprehend their allies’ deaths. According to the author, when Lieutenant Cross’ team was contemplating about who is to enter the tunnel, “Lee Strunk drew the number 17” then he laughed (O’Brien 10).

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The things they carried Tim O’brien had strong feelings about the war. He despised it and protested against it but that still didn’t stop him from being drafted into it. He felt depressed and isolated after being drafted. O’brien tried to get out of it but failed. Tim hated war, he understood that sometimes there needed to be one but, he did not feel that way about the vietnam war.

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Nevertheless, O’Brien, who is the author, character, and narrator of the story, explains that “stories can save us” (O’Brien 225). Furthermore, he says, “I keep Linda alive. And Ted Lavender, too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and a slim young man I killed, and an old man sprawled beside a pigpen, and several others whose bodies I once lifted and dumped into a truck. They’re all about the dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world” (O’Brien 225).

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After she died that had a huge effect on Obrien and he had a hard time getting over her death because he could not find a coping method. Linda’s role was so important because it encouraged Obrien to find a coping method for the empty hole he had in his heart that he was feeling .Linda forces Obrien to use his writing to cope with her death, by telling stories with the memories he had with her, keeping her name

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In “Ambush”, where O’Brien killed a lone Vietnamese soldier, we get a glimpse of how O’Brien reacts to the experiences he undergoes during the war. O’Brien gives a grisly description of the dead man’s corpse, showing just how deeply the memory is etched into his brain. O’Brien also speaks of how, years later, he “hasn’t finished sorting it out” (O’Brien 128). Despite so much time passing, he is still incapable of forgiving himself for the things he did during the war. Further, this isn’t the only experience that O’Brien isn’t able to get past.

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It is a way to carry their presence, and for the writers and listeners of the stories to feel as if they are still right next to them. O’Brien often refers to his stories as dreaming, “They’re all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world” (225). This shows the similarities between dreaming and storytelling. Both are ways of keeping the dead alive, and ways to ensure that they’re not forgotten.

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O’Brien feels extremely guilty for killing someone. He is not sure what to do or how to feel. O’Brien does not exactly say if he was the man who actually killed him, or if someone else did. He hints that if it was not him that killed the poor man. Death has a way of changing a

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The use of a ‘dead’ end shows that the thought of dying is on his subconscious. It also ties in with the warmth spilling out as he becomes cold just a dead body would. In summary, the images O’Brien uses in this passage are very much surreal and no doubtedly prove that he uses surrealism in his work. He does so in a meaningful manner to give insight to his character’s subconscious thoughts just as the definition

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When people have to deal with death loss they can form bad habits out of it like not keeping good hygiene or they could stop doing activities they once enjoyed. The death loss stage could even be worse especially if it’s a really close loved one that died. In the “Things They Carried”, O’Brien had to deal with death loss even though it was a completely random person he still had to deal with death loss because it just stayed on his conscience for killing a man he didn’t consider an

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O’Brien shows his guilt of the death by constantly going over how he died and how he looked when he died in the chapter O’Brien constantly states that the man has skinny wrists, skinny ankles, a star-shaped hole where his eye should be, and how his jaw was down in his throat. The repetition of the way the boy looks shows the sense of failure that O’Brien feels for not helping we’re not saving the boy, even if it was him that was killed. This guilt can also be seen by the way he doesn’t respond when Qiuwa talks to him and says that it is his fault and how he tries to get him up and moving again. How O’Brien tells the story that the boy might have lived also shows guilt about how the boy died too young and how he had a life ahead of

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Tim O’Brien experiences something similar when Linda dies, and he asks to go see the body as “[he] tried to pretend she was taking a nap, her hands folded at her stomach, just sleeping away the afternoon” (O’Brien 229). Picturing the situation in a brighter light generally helps the weight of the death off that person’s shoulders. Typically, death is an extremely difficult experience to get through, but imagining such a different outcome helps to overcome it. Self-blame is never the answer, even though a lot of the time, it is a default feeling after losing someone close. A large portion of overcoming a thing like death is to prevent self blame and emotional trauma in the first

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Obrien keeps the deceased characters Linda, Kiowa, Ted Lavender, Curt and Timmy alive, through his memories, dreams and stories. In Tim O’Brien’s “Lives of the Dead,” the loss of innocence and the power of literacy are both prevalent themes. Symbols are often used in a story to mean more than its literary meaning; Linda’s red cap, in “Lives of the Dead,” is a symbol of innocence’s. Linda’s innocence affected neither her illness nor death. Linda was O’Brien’s childhood girlfriend; when she first found out she was sick and had cancer, she began to wear a red cap, every day.

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