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Imagery In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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Controversy of the Iraq War sparked an ethical conversation that was similar to the Vietnam War, authors such as Tim O’Brien and Chris Kyle share their primary accounts on their thoughts of war. In 1990, about 15 years after the Vietnam war ended, Tim O’Brien publishes his work of fiction called, The Things They Carried. The Things They Carried was a melancholy, detailed collection of short stories that follows the protagonist, Tim O’Brien and his company of men before, during and after the Vietnam War. Later in 2012, after his tour of duty in Iraq, Chris Kyle publishes his memoir of his accounts in Iraq. American Sniper is a patriotic, straightforward novel that explains Kyle’s thought process while he’s at the Iraq War. The Things They …show more content…

Visible imagery is used when O’Brien describes the man’s corpse, he describes the man in great detail which humanizes the Vietnamese soldier. The more the protagonist describes the man, the more the feeling of regret and guilt sets into the reader and it makes the effects of war more daunting. The author also touches kinesthetic imagery by making the reader feel for the author when he begins to create the corpse’s backstory. The readers feels sympathy for O’Brien because he is already consumed with guilt and pain. In the story, O’Brien reflects his own life onto the Vietnamese soldier and the reader sees that. The author uses these to types of imagery to protest war by humanizing the Vietnamese soldier rather than making the soldier into a heartless monster. Unlike Chris Kyle, who shapes the citizen and soldiers of Iraq into being one huge enemy whose one mission is to kill Americans. The excerpt in American Sniper states, “The Marines we flooding up the road, marching north to liberate the country from Saddam Hussein.. We landed on al-Faw Peninsula and secured the oil terminal there so Saddam couldn’t set it ablaze as he had during the First Gulf War.. Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of

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In The Things They Carried there was a lot going on in my essay. I had a weak thesis to, I did not explain how the rhetorical devices O’Brien used was significant to the audience, and I did not have a conclusion. First, for my thesis, I kept most of the order I had before, but deleted the metaphor part and moved it somewhere else. Also, in my body paragraphs, I was skipping important ideas such as the most important: the audience, I had to make sure I wrote about how O’Brien’s rhetorical devices affected them. Such as when he use polysyndeton it was so that the readers understand that soldiers did not have one feeling throughout the war but multiple.

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In the chapter when he describes the man he kills, he talks about the state of the dead body by saying, “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole…the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him” (O’Brien Chapter 11). This brutal and horrifying imagery displays an irrefutable element of truth to O’Brien’s writing. Not only does this imagery highlight the truth to his writing, but it also sheds light on the brutal truth about the war in Vietnam. By using imagery as such a strong rhetorical device in his writing, he gives the average person a taste of just how barbaric and cruel Vietnam felt for the people who experience the war first hand on either side of the fighting. Tim O’Brien gives a very detailed and intense description of his time fighting in Vietnam during their war with America.

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In the story, The Things They Carried, in the chapter, Spin, Tim O’Brien wrote the quote “Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity when memory is erased when there is nothing to remember except the story.” In this quote, O’Brien uses a rhetorical device called, Anaphora. Interpreting the meaning is not always exactly what the original meaning is.

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Symbolism in O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, plays a huge part in trying to support the author’s message. O’Brien uses symbols everywhere such as with the characters and to help develop the structure of the novel. The author decides to hide some of the symbols while some of the other symbols are in the open, making the symbols easy for the readers to pick up or understand clearly. The author uses symbolism in different forms, mainly intangible for an example. The main point of using symbols in a novel is to engage the readers, wanting them to continue reading, get the hidden messages across, and mainly addressing the theme.

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Things They Carried By Tim O Brien: Poem Analysis

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Tim O’Brien used his friends and loved ones to show that death is not the end of someone. Wallace Stevens uses his poem to show how life goes on after death. Johnny Cash uses a song to show how people are remembered. As long as there is the memory of someone they are never gone. A person’s story is what keeps them alive years after they are gone.

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Unveiling the Impact of War “War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.” ­ Thomas Mann War, in and of itself, creates memories that many soldiers discharged from service do not wish to talk about. However, the bottled ­up emotions many servicemen and servicewomen have because of their roles in the war creates a dilemma in that these veterans need to vent out their emotions. In the war novel The Things They Carried (1990) by Tim O’Brien, the story revolves around a fictional Tim O’Brien writing a war novel about a fictional version of his fictional self, and his time in the Vietnam War. Likewise, Oliver Stone’s war film ​Platoon​(1986) covers the story of recent recruit Chris Taylor, portrayed by Charlie Sheen; Taylor’s narrative

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