Fear And Shame In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

Brene Brown once said “Shame is the most powerful, master emotion. It’s the fear that we’re not good enough”. The writer, Tim O’Brien, also the narrator, and his fellow soldiers often struggle while at war. A big struggle most of them face is the feeling of fear and shame. They think a lot about the deeper meaning of doing what they are doing, and what should have been. The threat of the things that happen at war stare them in the face and it changes them mentally, and gives them a whole new perspective. In the novel The Things They Carried the themes of fear and shame are shown through being fearful because of constant threat of death, loss of close friends, separation of loved ones, and so many other things which also leads to that shame

He often would be alone stuck in his own thoughts. He sometimes felt sorry for himself: his emotions left him with an empty feeling inside. Tim explains his mixture of emotions as the equivalent of being paralyzed. Where you do not feel anything in some sense, but everything at the same time. “I feared the war, yes, but I also feared exile. I was afraid of walking away from my own life, my friends and my family, my whole everything, everything that mattered to me” (O’Brien 42). During this moment Tim was speaking about his thoughts about going to war. He could see himself doing things that soldiers do, but still dreaded leaving the ones that are closest to him, his loved ones. This shows how the fear put this burden on his mental state, the fear was always

Tim spent most of his time at this lodge with a man named Elroy. During this time with Elroy, Tim was in deep thought about how sometimes he feels insufficient. He wants people to think highly of him, but is afraid that they do not. He felt shame in the things he did because he did not know if what he was doing was right, or good enough. “I was ashamed to be at the Tip Top lodge. I was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to be doing the right thing” (O’Brien 49). He felt as if even though he was going out and fighting for his country, doing sometimes awful things that had to be done just to help the other people of his country. Even though he was doing something that's right for his country, you have to do morally wrong things in order to make that happen. Even though was doing the right thing, that shame of things that he's forced to do took over