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Guilt And Shame In The Things They Carried

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Literary Analysis: Guilt and Shame within “The Things They Carried”
In the book The Things They Carried, there is a strong overall theme of guilt and shame. These two feelings correspond greatly with their involvement in the war. From these feelings, the Vietnam soldiers were forced to bear with hopelessness and despair as well when reflecting on their lives, and to continue to cope with it - for better or for worse. Jimmy Cross gets distracted by looking at the pictures of Martha in the chapter “The Things They Carried.” Due to his inattentiveness, he fails to keep a watchful eye out for Khe which results in Khe’s death. Jimmy feels very guilty about this, and handles it by living with regret and holding on to the belief that he should have …show more content…

There are so many people affected by the deaths of their comrades. After O’Brien kills a man, and he feels bad, but also realizes that life goes on. That even though a tragedy happened, he has to keep going. It’s about the beauty of life instead of death. (118-125)
Within the chapter “Ambush”, there is a lot of shame and regret. When O’Brien’s daughter Kathleen said, “You keep writing these war stories, so I guess you must’ve killed somebody.” O’Brien disputed this at first, and said of course not. He then recalls one particular instance when he was pulling a pin out of a grenade. He wanted to warn the young man that was getting ready to be blown away, but O’Brien didn’t say anything to try to help. Right in front of his eyes he saw him die. He is having a rough time forgiving himself. (125)
Norman Bowker hangs himself at the YMCA in the later chapter “Notes.” He has so much guilt from the battlefield that he felt trapped. Vietnam robbed the life from him. Bowker felt he was responsible for his inability to find a method to communicate his feelings after failing to save someone and watching them die before his eyes. When Kiowa was on the ledge and he let go, it killed him.

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Each individual elt responsible for Kiowa’s death. In the chapter “ Field Trip” storytelling/memory was being used. The men thought it was their responsibility for what happened to Kiowa and how they were looking for his body they were talking and sharing about stories they did with Kiowa. “ I wanted to tell Kiowa they he’d been a great friend, the very best, but all I could do was slap hands with the water ( O’Brien 178).

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He tried to concentrate on ... the war, all the dangers, but his love was too much for him.” (11) Jimmy Cross’s love later becomes a burden as he blames himself for the death of Ted Lavender “because he loved [Martha] so much and could not stop thinking about her” (6). “No more fantasies, he told himself.” (23) He realized that he and Martha were a world apart.

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The Things They Carried Analysis More often than not, a reader picks up the story, “The Things They Carried,” and notices the unavoidable overload of symbolism intertwined. The heavy burdens the soldiers carry is portrayed extremely well by the author’s use of symbols, as it is one of the main focuses the author seeks to make evident to the reader. However, the author does not only want you to focus on the symbols of the burdens these fictional characters carry, but he wants you to understand what they really went through and that his story symbolizes the lives of these real, brave soldiers.  “War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and

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In the short story, “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien focuses on this to show that everyone fighting in a war has a story. He spends the story describing the man he killed and searching for justification of his actions. He carries around guilt with him because of it, and his fellow soldiers try to help him justify and come to terms with his action by saying things like, “You want to trade places with him? Turn it all upside down= you want that? I mean, be honest,” (126) and “Tim, it’s a war.

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The Things They Carried, is a lot about what all of the men carried and what it all meant to each one of them. The author describing the material things wants to give a sense of the physical burden, but the guilt of men lost and the weight of responsibility was what truly weighed them down mentally and physically through the war. The author allows the reader to realize how each of the characters dealt with their time within the war and how they coped giving them a sense of hope to survive, and how they traveled through Vietnam carrying the weight of physical burdens and the weight of responsibility, loss and guilt and the memories they will carry for the rest of their lives.

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In The Things They Carried, O'Brien explores how shame can be shown in different ways for soldiers, including shame over their own actions, shame over their weaknesses, and shame over their inability to connect with or help others. One of the most notable examples of shame in the novel is the character of Jimmy Cross, who feels intense shame and guilt over the death of one of his men, Ted Lavender. Cross blames himself for Lavender's death, feeling that he was too distracted by his own thoughts of Martha to properly lead his army. This shame continues to trouble Cross long after the incident, even after he has left Vietnam.

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O’Briens intended audience is people who have an interest in war, and uses mortality and death, along with morality to help the audience get a deeper understanding of what could possibly occur at war. First, O’Brien discusses how mortality and death greatly affected many of the men around him. In the chapter ” In the Field” Kiowa is gone and there is nothing they could do to save him. The

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Even after all these years, O’Brien is still unable to get the images of Vietnam out of him head, specifically of the man he killed. In the novel, he repeats the description of the man numerous times, almost to the point of excess, saying,“he was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay with one leg bent beneath him, his jaw in his throat, his face neither expressive nor inexpressive. One eye was shut. The other was a star-shaped hole” (124).

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Tim knew that he was not a killer and that the war was going to be a stressful time for him. One of his biggest moments of feeling bad about what he did was when he killed his first soldier. O’Brien feels instant regret once he throws the grenade and kills the man. All other thoughts leave his mind, and his full focus and shock is on what he had just done. “I was terrified” he explains, “there were no thoughts about killing.

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The novel The Things They Carried is set in the Vietnam War. This narrative showcases the struggles and hardships of war through the theme of shame. Sham had a big impact on why soldiers went to war and how they felt about the war experience. For example, the soldiers felt shame when others died and for the emotions they felt. In the novel The Things They Carried, Tin O’Brien presents the element of shame through the character Jimmy Cross in order to reveal the corrupt motives of war; ultimately illustrating how the soldiers felt obligated to go to war for fear of bringing shame on others.

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This shows his poor mental state after loss, which comes up in many soldiers, especially if death is caused by their own hands. Another way death is taken into their own hands is by taking their own life. Norman Bowker, a man obsessed with other opinions and drowning in despair after watching his comrade drown, can’t live with himself after believing that he caused another to die. Post coming home from the war, and after not being able to live with the guilt, Norman “hanged himself... his friends found him hanging from a water pipe…

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In “Ambush” O’Brien conveys his everlasting guilt by stating “I did not hate the young man; I did not see him as the enemy; I did not ponder issues of morality or politics or military duty.” O’Brien also says “It was not a matter of live or die. There was no real peril. Almost certainly the young man would have passed by. And it will always be that way.”

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O’Brien discusses being unable to understand why he must fight, and why the innocent must die. Even as O’Brien tells the story of killing another soldier, he mentions feeling regret and hesitation. O’Brien threw a grenade at a soldier and for a moment wished he could warn him. Readers may also view the central question as a mystery. With the details provided by O’Brien, the reader may feel sympathetic towards the soldiers.

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(p. 126). Though he does not see him as the enemy, O’Brien reacts as he had been taught to in war; to forget most of your morals and shoot before you can be shot first, a fact Kiowa points out to him. “Later, I remember, Kiowa tried to tell me that the man would 've died anyway. He told me that it was a good kill, that I was a soldier and this was a war, that I should shape up and stop staring and ask myself what the dead man would ' ve done if things were reversed” (p. 127). Soldiers are expected to forget their morals and act as a soldier should.

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“That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future ... Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story” (36). The Things They Carried is a captivating novel that gives an inside look at the life of a soldier in the Vietnam War through the personal stories of the author, Tim O’Brien . Having been in the middle of war, O’Brien has personal experiences to back up his opinion about the war.

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