How Is The Figurative Language Used In The Things They Carried

In the fictional story, The Things They Carried, author and Vietnam veteran, Tim O’Brien, walks readers through the experience of characters in the Vietnam War. Through the experience of multiple soldiers, Tim O’Brien highlights the way that they tell stories and why they’re meaningful to the young soldiers. It relates to the trauma that the young soldiers underwent. Following the soldiers, the author uses strong diction, literary elements, and figurative language to show how soldiers used stories to cope with the trauma surrounding the Vietnam War.

In the chapter “Spin”, O’Brien uses motifs and repetition to stress the importance of story-telling for young soldiers. In this chapter, the author uses the motif of youth to emphasize how much

The difference in age highlights the motif of youth. This is beneficial when reflecting back on the war because it can aid readers to infer how young the narrator was during the war. It also indicates the impacts of war and how the narrator still thinks about war at forty-three years old, which is a sign of trauma. This helps the author's purpose by helping the audience understand why he’s still writing stories and talking about the war. This juxtaposition also helps readers compare the two characters. One is a Vietnam vet while the other is a child who doesn’t know about the war. Tim O’Brien added the character Kathleen to integrate the audience, who doesn’t know about the impacts of the Vietnam War, into the book. Throughout the book, Kathleen is brought up in hard times and it reflects how the reader might not understand any aspects of the war and how soldiers want to be able to share that experience and knowledge with them. In this chapter, the author also repeated that the narrator is “forty-three years old” (36). This is noteworthy because it emphasizes the motif of age and its importance. It’s important because it indicates the narrator's age and helps readers realize how young the soldiers were

In “Lives of the Dead'', O’Brien tells the story of Linda to compare the death of a young girl to the death of young soldiers. The narrator starts the chapter off by stating that “stories can save us” (213), which relates to how stories help soldiers cope. The narrator is telling readers how important storytelling actually is. This idea is continued later on in the chapter, when the narrator was reflecting on his childhood crush and how he “wanted to let her know how [he] felt” (217). This connects to previous chapters and how soldiers tell stories to communicate their real feelings to people. The narrator later explains how tragic this childhood crush came to be when she passed away. The author added this story about the narrator's childhood crush to make the readers understand the pain that the soldiers felt throughout the book. By reading about the death of a young child, readers feel sad and can connect that pain to how soldiers felt during the war because it puts things into perspective. Toward the end of the chapter, the narrator states that “we keep the dead alive with stories” (226) and he was “trying to save Timmy's life with a story” (233). By stating how important stories are, readers can connect how important stories are to people who served in the Vietnam War. The authors' message of how important storytelling was to soldiers as a way to cope is seen in