Personal Experiences In The Things They Carried, By Tim O Brien

“Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America, not on the battlefields of Vietnam”- Marshall Mcluhan. In the novel The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien uses his personal experiences to describe his time spent in Vietnam throughout the war. The reason the novel is written in a nonlinear format because he is writing the novel as he recalls his experiences. However, the main purpose of him writing the novel was to help people understand what the soldiers had went through and the truth about the Vietnam War is known to the public. Tim O’Brien uses themes such as storytelling/memory and morality to demonstrate the impact of the experiences the soldiers endured and how that has affected their daily lives.

In the chapters “Field Trip” and “The Ghost Soldiers,” a common theme is Morality because the decisions O’Brien must make regarding his personal beliefs and morals. This theme is developed in the chapter “Field Trip” because O’Brien feels that returning to the field where the battle occured and returning Kiowa’s moccasins was a moral obligation for him. While returning them he says,”I wanted to tell Kiowa that he’d been a great friend, the very best, but all I could do was slap hands with the water”(O’Brien 178). This idea shows that he is emotional about Kiowa and he had a close

O’Brien wants to follow through with his plan of revenge on Bobby however his morals prevent him from doing what he truly wants to do. This is shown when O’Brien says, “Jorgenson blinked and tried to smile. Oddly I almost felt sympathy for him”(O’Brien 189). This shows that even though O’Brien wants badly to hate Bobby, he cannot because his morals are getting in the way of his true feelings. This dilemma relates to morality because in the end, O’Brien decides to make the right decision and not get revenge on Bobby; instead just scare him a