Gore And Violence In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

In today’s world people often overlook the gruesome and violent events that occur, rather than confronting the issue. In Tim O’Brien’s metafiction novel, The Things They Carried, he avoids sugarcoating the scenes that soldiers faced before, during, and after the war by describing the gore and violence in every detail. By including the scenes of violence, Tim O’Brien portrays the horrific effects of war on soldiers and the unnecessary casualties that the soldiers experience. Whether it be Rat Kiley murdering a baby water buffalo, Azar blowing up a puppy, or Lee Strunk begging his friend not to kill him after an explosion, O’Brien assures that the audience will have to confront the conflicts that these soldiers faced. Going into war involves

Contrary to people thinking the United States should not interfere, too many young men were being drafted, and the war was pointless, O’Brien still pointed out that soldiers were still fighting in the war and facing the possibility of not knowing whether they would live to see another day. He described the gruesome memories that he any many other military figures were bringing back home. One scene describes his friend Norman Bowker after coming back home, driving around a lake eleven times thinking about his friend Kiowa drowning in a field of sewage which represents the ability to cut right to the heart of the matter; soldiers coming back from war in emotional hardships. Bowker goes on to write O’Brien only to hang himself a couple years later showing the impact the war had on soldiers and the lack of help they received after the war due to many people not accepting the war. His expresses his opinion by stating, “If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth,

Specifically when Ted Lavender adopts a puppy during the war and later discovers that Azar blew the puppy up with a claymore demonstrating just how twisted a man can become as a result of war. To make matters worse, Ted Lavender goes on to ask why everyone is mad at him for killing the puppy representing the mental illness brought on by war also. To put it bluntly,“it couldn't be more banal, more pointless, more pathetic” (Ruff 167). Without the scene where the puppy was murdered the book would have a gap and the focus on the effect war has on soldiers mentally and emotionally would be underrepresented. Tim O’Brien knows that everyone is sympathetic towards the death of a puppy and he uses that to draw the audience’s attention to the matter of war’s