Getting To Know The Truth In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien
Elena Amirhasani B4 Haunting Memories Wreck Lives In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, numerous short stories reveal aching truths about a group of Vietnam soldiers. One of the characters, Norman Bowker, although mentioned sporadically throughout the book, becomes very significant in the chapters “Speaking of Courage,” and “Notes”. Norman walks the readers through the full experience of trying to hold on to past memories, being a part of the army, and returning home yet feeling out of place. As the book progresses, the author reveals more of this character’s personality through the four different roles he plays: a soldier, a son, a friend, and a Vietnam veteran. Through these four identities, and O’Brien’s use of fragmentation and symbolism,
Imagine what war looks like. An image of suffering, grief, guilt, torture. The story, while set in Vietnam, is just as relevant today with the conflicts we have. Tim O’Brien, the main character, had to go through all the discomfort that comes with war. Even with all of the external and physical battles, the real conflict might just be inside the soldier.
The antagonizing adversity, the convoluted hardships, and the reassuring lies – a war story that engulfs its audience in morality by tapping into a soldier’s inner memories back in the Vietnam War. The memories that Tim O’Brien possesses are documented in The Things They Carried, as it details the tragedy of mindlessly wandering on the battlefield with the disturbing thought of possibly being dead in seconds while carrying the burdens of the companions who died. It is a tragedy from the perspective of insiders versus outsiders, as one persists while the other watches them mourn their lives. Looking back to old memories like a distant friend, Tim O’Brien compounds fear, friendship, and falsehoods to retell his experiences as an American soldier to demonstrate that we are human individuals coping
In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, O’Brien is the narrator recounting his experiences as a Vietnam War veteran through the form of storytelling. After death, people and experiences fade away and are often forgotten, and the only way to keep their lives remembered is to continue to tell them through story. There were many traumatic events that O’Brien had to deal with, namely the deaths of soldiers, the vietnamese soldier he killed, and the death of his childhood friend Linda. Many of the surviving soldiers developed PTSD and had flashbacks, while O’Brien held them in and blocked away the memories, as a form of catharsis. Storytelling becomes his form of therapy, and method of preserving the lives of the deceased.
What’s more powerful, the truth or a lie? How are we able to tell the difference? It’s all from a person’s perspective and the way we choose to spin the story. There is no way to identify the real situation unless you were there to witness the event. Throughout the novel, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien there is a discussion over whether he is using fiction or nonfiction.
The novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brian raises questions about how fiction can be more truthful than facts. The book contains many short stories about Vietnam told by different perspectives. The author creates characters that seem very real based on personal experiences. These characters tell graphic stories about the war making the book seem real. O’Brian creates a rich story by exaggerating details in order to get the reader to try and be able to feel how he experienced the war.
When soldiers return home after being actively deployed, they struggle with adapting back to the real world due to having severe ptsd and depression. On the battlefield, soldiers carry things such as pebbles, letters and photographs, they serve as symbols of memories, the loss of something or someone, and their identity. The tangible items that the soldiers carried help them withstand the traumatic experiences they had to face during the war In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, O Brien tells us all the things soldiers had to face through with their mental stability and the damage the trauma caused to the soldiers For soldiers that have experienced traumatic experiences during their deployment often find it hard to forget what they have seen You can see this as O Brien states this in his story that But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget (pg.33) It when in deployment you do and see stuff that you don't want to see but are forced to see and you will be unable to forget the things that you did to other soldiers and the things that you have seen done to other soldiers. once you experience that it will be almost impossible to forget those people and some soldiers even have nightmares of the people they have killed.
The book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is about the Vietnam War and the physical and mental burdens that soldiers carried, but it is not just about the violence of war, it is also a love story. O’ Brien interweaves the characters of Mary Anne, Martha and Kathleen into the novel in sporadic ways that at first it just seems random, but it is done that way to remind the reader that sometimes there is no war without love, and that is the role of the women in this story. Each one of them serves the purpose of being a beacon of light that shines through the darkness that is war. One of the most influential female in O’Brien’s story is Kathleen, his ten year old daughter. She is one of the reasons that O’Brien explains his war experience
“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.
Over 9 million military personnel served in the Vietnam War, one of, if not the most, controversial wars in American history. Studies conducted in 1968, before and after the presidential election, showed that the majority of people believed that entering the war was a mistake. As well as this, the studies also showed that nearly 60 percent of people believed that America should pull its troops out of Vietnam, either by an active effort to end the war or by pulling out entirely (Lau 474). Despite the fact that it was perhaps the most controversial military operation in history, 75 percent of the total forces in Vietnam were volunteers (Hall 25). This begs the question, what led these soldiers to serve in a war that nearly half the country
“Make plain to them the excellence of killing / And a field where a thousand corpses lie” (Crane 21-22). The poem “War is Kind” shows that the soldiers are brainwashed to believe that it is a good thing to kill, but in contrast, many soldiers return from war scarred from the mentally exhausting tasks that they endure. Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, is a collection of short stories that expresses the experiences and feelings of a platoon of American soldiers facing combat in the jungles of Vietnam. The characters endure heartbreak and hardships that change them as people and will carry with themselves after the war. In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, O’Brien reveals how the mindset of soldiers changes when guilt,
Literature is a medium of truth-telling. Literature about literature is a medium of truth about truth. Tim O’Brien’s fictionalization of experiences in the Vietnam war, “The Things They Carried,” has the weight of a memoir unburned by facts. The question of fiction’s ability to uncover truth better than events is raised and answered at the same time. The work as a whole affirms this idea.
In The Things They Carried the author, Tim O’Brien, often shares his own war experiences, and in most, if not all of his stories, he mixes lies in with truths in order to compose them to be believable and comprehensible. Many times throughout the novel, O’Brien fails to acknowledge when he’s falsifying his stories, however, he notes that he actually adds lies in the reports on his wartime experiences, but doesn’t provide when he does so. He claims so many people don’t believe the reality of war that he truly experienced that he’s obliged to lie. Although he may be protecting the audience from the harsh reality of war, at times it’s burdensome to decipher myth from fact. He often leaves the reader wondering what actually happened, what did not
In The Things They Carried, the author and narrator, Tim O' Brien seeks to go beyond simply telling the stories he has to tell about his time as a soldier in the Vietnam War. He wants to tell the audience a true war story, and dedicates a chapter, aptly named "How to Tell a True War Story," to giving the reader a better idea of his idea of how a war story should be told. O'Brien's recounting of the story of the baby buffalo epitomizes his view of telling a war story by implementing the concept of blurring truth and fiction which recurs throughout the book and exemplifies how it could enhance the reader's interpretation and understanding of the events and ideas that the author wants to convey, which go beyond a simple retelling of a war story,
While the stories told in The Things They Carried are awfully realistic, the novel is a work of fiction. The stories are proven to be made up because the title page blatantly says “a work of fiction by Tim O’Brien.” However, a reader will find it difficult to remember the stories had never occurred, because of how convincingly O’Brien told them. In fact the author has such a strong sense of conviction that by the end of the novel the reader will assuredly have forgotten it was written as a work of fiction. O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried roughly twenty years after exiting the Vietnam War.
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