Light Presence In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

In an article by IANDS, they complied seventeen stories about people who have had near-death experiences. Many people on earth have had near death experiences. All their stories have involved some form of light, like the light at the end of the tunnel or just a bright, white light surrounding them. With the stories told by these people, Tim O’Brien introduces light in the stories told in The Things They Carried. The Alpha Company’s many stories involving someone's death have a light or sunlight aspect. The light presence in many of their stories help the company overcome or lessen the trauma caused by the Vietnam war, helping many of their recoveries improve.

The presences of light are shown when Curt Lemon dies and the men witnessing it is

The company is camped out in a field where a nearby village uses it to discard their toilets as it storms around them. Two soldiers, an unnamed boy (Tim O’Brien) and his friend Kiowa, are chatting about their families and hometowns. The boy decides to show Kiowa a picture of his girlfriend through the flick of his flashlight. Right when he does, mortar rounds are fired from the Vietnamese army, leading the boy to think, “Like murder, the boy thought. The flashlight made it happen,” (O’Brien 170). The boy uses the flashlight as a way to avoid his own guilt from thinking that turning on the flashlight had lead to Kiowa’s untimely death. The boy believes that turning on the flashlight had lead to the untimely death of Kiowa. Many of the men in the company uses light as way to represent the guilt and shame they feel when one of their brothers are killed. The boy starts to dig, looking for his picture, flashlight and his friend. As he continues to dig in the shit field, he thinks, “The flashlight had done it. Like a target shining in the dark,” (O’Brien 177). The boy believes that the flashlight is the reason why mortar rounds are aimed at their campsite. The soldiers in the company believe that when light is happening, something horrible happens to either them or one of the brothers. They want to use the light as a way to disguise a horrible

Alpha Company is hiding near a path that leads to the village of My Khe and Tim O’Brien sees a man with weapons walking down the path. He throws a grenade at the man and it kills him. Tim is in shock from killing someone and so close up that he notices, “Even in the shade a single blade of sunlight sparkled against the buckle of his ammunition belt,” (O’Brien 128). He is so distracted by the mere thought of killing a man, he starts to make up his past before he was killed. The sunlight that sparkled against the dead man’s body is used to symbolizes how upset Tim is over killing a man. Tim notices how the body is still bleeding and in odd angles after death. As Tim makes up a backstory for the man that he kills, the man “thinks” about how he will die, “He knew he would see a flash of light,” (O’Brien 130). Tim creates a backstory about the man so he is not as scarred from how he was killed. The sunlight that is shown against the corpse is a way for O’Brien to focus on something other than how the man looks like after death. The dead man’s backstory made up by Tim showed that how light affects everyone fighting in the war. The light is used to symbolize what many people see right before they