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Field Trip By Tim O Brien: Chapter Analysis

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In The Things They Carried: Field Trip, Tim O'Brien takes his ten year old daughter, Kathleen, to Vietnam around the twentieth anniversary of the wars end. This chapter is important to the story because it not only gives the readers some feeling of validity and peace, but it’s important to the overall closure to the story. The chapter starts off with the author reminiscing about the field of where Kiowa actually died. O’Brien compares the current day Vietnam land and culture to bloody, gruesome, and heartbreaking, wartime Vietnam that he was once unfortunately very familiar with. Although this trip was supposed to be for Kathleen, she did not seem to be very impressed with the scenery. They later take a trip to a small creek that Tim decides
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This phase out of the book The Things They Carried, shows how important a detailed description is. Having read the fictional story about Tim O’Brien’s experience in the Vietnam War, can really set off that emotional connection because it makes you feel like you are really

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The Things They Carried is a fascinating and illuminating novel written by Tim O'Brien. Published in 1990, it is a collection of interconnected short stories that depicts the experiences of American soldiers during the Vietnam War. In his novel The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien employs Juxtaposition to create the effect of long-term effects of trauma and an abrupt, violent loss of innocence. The chapters “The Man I Killed”, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, and “How to Tell a True War Story” work together to produce this effect.

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The Vietnam War was full of grief, heartache and tragedy, no one experienced this more than the soldiers who fought in it. Tim O’Brien shows the trauma the war has caused him in his book The Things They Carried. The story focuses on the character Tim, a member of Alpha Company, who tells his stories of the war. Many of these stories circle around guilt, and each character in the book has a different way of coping with it. One character, Kiowa, acts as the glue that holds Alpha Company together.

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“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth” (83). The theme of “happening-truth” versus “story-truth” is a constant opposition Tim O’Brien uses to convey his “true war story” to his audience. Many times in the book The Things They Carried, O’Brien lies to the reader to attempt to give the reader realistic events, so they can relate to the emotions O’Brien felt during the Vietnam war. O’Brien makes it clear in the chapter “Field Trip” that a person who has not been to war cannot comprehend what it was like. He uses a fictional character, Kathleen, to be a stand in for the reader; she is innocent and free from the burden of serving in wartime.

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-Introduction- The novel, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, is a narrative composed in a non-linear structure which consists of short stories all drawn from O’Brien's experiences during the war. Each of these short stories are linked together to portray the emotional aspects and burdens young men suffered during this time. For context, The Vietnam War was a conflict between South Vietnam and North Vietnam, with the U.S. as the South's ally. It resulted in over 300,000 American injuries and 58,000 deaths, with the average age of soldiers being only 19. This left many vulnerable to psychological and emotional difficulties at an early age.

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Spencer Christensen Amanda Aldridge ENG 102 02 May 2024. Preferential Perspectives in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried: The morality and events of the Vietnam War will always be a contentious and solemn topic. Over the decades, countless forms of media have discussed or portrayed it, with varying degrees of truthfulness and respect. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is ambiguous in the former and perhaps overindulgent in the latter. The novel comprises multiple connected short stories concerning events O’Brien may or may not have gone through during the Vietnam War, and it examines the war and the men involved through a philosophical, moral, and emotional lens.

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Death Is a Powerful Motivator In “The Things They Carried”, Tim O’Brien, the author, portrays his own experience in the Vietnam War. Although O’Brien fabricated some of the stories and exaggerated some of the parts, the main idea O’Brien wished to display is present. He wanted to allow the reader a view of the war along with the physical burdens and emotional burdens the soldiers carried with them. These burdens effected the soldiers and helped define them as people.

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In war, there is a winning side and a losing side, but both suffer casualties. Afflictions are not always dealt in death and physical pain, but also emotional damage. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, he emphasizes war’s capabilities to change people. When Mary Anne, a sweet, innocent, all-American girl, arrives in Vietnam to be with her soldier boyfriend, change is inevitable, and she will eventually lose her naiveté. O’Brien utilizes personification, jarring imagery, hyperbole, and pathos to convey that war shatters all innocence, no matter how hard one may try to avoid the change.

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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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The Things They Carried, is a reflection on how Tim O’Brien spent his days in Vietnam. There are many factors to why it can be difficult to share a war story, there is no proof to tell how much he is just telling a story or saying something else to make it easier to share his experience. “In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. ”pg.68.

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For many soldiers returning home from war, the truth about what happened can be a hard and confusing thing. The book The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, and published in 1990, describes his time in the war. O’Brien struggles the whole time with differentiating his emotional memories with events that actually happened, and tries to impress upon the reader what it was actually like to be over in Vietnam. O’brien believes that war stories do not always accurately portray what war was like, and that is why story-truth can be truer than the happening-truth.

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In this chapter, O’Brien takes his daughter out on a mini field trip in Vietnam to the place Kiowa died. He told his daughter the simplified story-truth of it all, “‘this whole war… why was everybody so mad at everybody else?’ I shook my head. ‘They weren’t mad, exactly. Some people wanted one thing, other people wanted another thing’”

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