Imagery And Symbolism In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

“I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth”(O’Brien 171). In “The Things They Carried” Tim O’Brien describes his experience and many other soldiers experiences in the Vietnam war. This book is based off his memory, imagination and storytelling which depicts many perspectives of life before, during and after war. Tim O’Brien uses imagery and symbolism to address that war destroys innocent people and at the same time soliders loss of innocence. O’Brien uses the imagery of the description of the man he killed and the prank of scaring Bobby to show soldiers loss of innocence. In “The Man I Killed” O’Brien kills a young vietnamese soldier, he's in shock and can't stop staring at the

His health was poor, his body small and fragile. He liked books. He wanted someday to be a teacher of mathematics”(O’Brien 118-119). O’Brien uses imagery to describe to the reader that war is a very brutal place and some of the choices soldiers make linger after they happen. He uses this story in particular to show his fixation on the young man's life to demonstrate his quilt, but at the same time distance himself to dual the pain. He knows he is responsible for the man's death and feels guilty but he already knows his innocence was lost a long time ago. In“The

The result of this is O’Brien almost dies of shock and when he finally comes over to him he doesn’t treat his wounds correctly. O’Brien has to be on bed rest and can’t participate so he feels he is longer part of the team. He wants Bobby to pay for what he done so Azar and him plan to scare Bobby really badly. “I’d come to this war a quiet, thoughtful sort of person, a college grad… all the credentials, but after seven months in the bush I realized that those high, civilized trappings had crushed under the weight of simple daily realities. I’d turned mean inside… I now felt a deep coldness inside me, something dark and beyond reason... I was capable of evil… We called the enemy ghosts. ‘Bad night,’ we’d say… You don’t try to scare in broad daylight. You wait. Because the darkness squeezes you inside yourself, you get cut off from the outside world, the imagination takes over. You see ghost. Bullshit you tell yourself. But then you remember the guys who died: Curt Lemon, Kiowa, Ted Lavender, a half-dozen others whose