Through out the book titled The Things They Carried, many characters are brought upon us, who are portrayed differently from the beginning of the book to the end of the book. The author shows or portrays what can truly happen to humans as they go through time in war. War will change their character’s thoughts and appearance to the reader just by the way they are shown in the book. An example of a character that has changed throughout the book is Norman Bowker. At the beginning of the story, Norman Bowker was a young soldier who seems to be like anyone who has not experienced war themselves. The things he had carried with him throughout the war were a journal and also a vietnamese thumb. The vietnamese thumb was given to him by Mitchell Sanders. These items made Norman had …show more content…
Norman had felt as if he had no one to talk to or relate to because no one around him had experienced war like he had. He tried to keep jobs when he was home from war, but not one of them had lasted more than 3 weeks. Since he feels he is unable to speak to anyone about war, he writes a letter to O’Brien, telling his entire war story. He soon feels as if he cannot do anything without thinking about war and hangs himself in the locker room of his town’s YMCA. These are all examples of how Norman Bowker had changed throughout the story. He went from being innocent, or without war on his mind ever, to having nothing else to say to anyone if it didn’t involve war. After he had came back from war, he was not able to keep a job, he was not able to keep a conversation going with anyone because no one knew what he was going through. He was also suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) which in the long run, made him feel as if no one would understand him or his story because no one else was in war when he was and no one experienced what he