Guilt And Shame In 'The Dentist By Tim O' Brien

We find in many of the stories that the soldiers mentioned are haunted by the feelings of “guilt and shame”. These feeling seem to make them do irrational and crazy things. In the short story, “The Dentist”, by Tim O’Brien, we find Curt Lemon, taken over by shame for his fear of being seen and treated by the war dentist. Upon his first initial visit to the dentist, he had fainted. To prove to himself and the other soldiers that he is a “real brave man”, he returned to the dentist in the middle of the night and demanded that the dentist remove a tooth, even though he had no problems with his teeth (62-64) Later a story is told of Norman Bowker who hung himself because he could not get over the same feeling of shame that he felt for not having

O’Brien even verbalizes of himself in the story “On the Rainy River,” where he contemplated running across the the Canadian border to skip the volunteer draft. O’Brien had stayed several days fishing and had gotten so proximate to the border that he could have just ambulated right across it. His conscience got the best of him. He could not stand to cerebrate of the disconcertment he would of went through from the local townspeople and his family if he had not held up to his convivial obligations (33-47). Another story that was went along the same line as O’Briens was about Lt. Jimmy Cross in “In the Field,” where it’s mentioned how he didnt even want to join the reserves and only had done so because his fellow pals and friends from college had done so. O’Brien shows how the characters of the men only did what was expected of them as men, but authentically they were just puerile boys playing to be men (109-120). “The soldiers fear and loathe impotency, so in order to keep their comities intact, they require to bulwark their reputations (The Things They Carried Theme of Respect and Reputation

He even tells the readers that Rat, Kiowa, and Mitchell Sanders were fictional characters. This leaves a sense of apostasy to the reader because there is even a story indited that has Rat telling of a puerile woman and her coming to the Vietnam War to stay with her boyfriend and all this puerile woman went through in the “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” (64-82). Does this designate that the story of adolescent Mary Ann is erroneous? Does it betoken that Norman Bowker never committed suicide over the guilt he felt for the death of his friend Kiowa? I mean how could he if Kiowa never subsisted. “O'Brien's endeavoring to tell us that albeit they're made up, there's an abundance of truth to their characters. True stories and true characters don't fit orderly into a narrative or into character roles. The best way for O'Brien to communicate his Vietnam experience in “The Things They Carried “is to give us the "story-truth," not the "transpiring-truth" (The Things They Carried Theme of Truth-http://www.shmoop.com/things-they-carried/truth). O’Brien uses story-truth in lieu of transpiring-truth as a way to show the vicissitudes in between authenticity during war time and as a way of making the reader understand the experience