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

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“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 …show more content…

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

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Even though the other soldiers around him also have killed opposing soldiers, he still is filled with shame and regret for his actions. O’Brien lost his innocence at that moment because he no longer would be able to call himself an innocent man. He now in his mind was a cold blooded

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The things they carried Tim O’brien had strong feelings about the war. He despised it and protested against it but that still didn’t stop him from being drafted into it. He felt depressed and isolated after being drafted. O’brien tried to get out of it but failed. Tim hated war, he understood that sometimes there needed to be one but, he did not feel that way about the vietnam war.

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In the short story, “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien focuses on this to show that everyone fighting in a war has a story. He spends the story describing the man he killed and searching for justification of his actions. He carries around guilt with him because of it, and his fellow soldiers try to help him justify and come to terms with his action by saying things like, “You want to trade places with him? Turn it all upside down= you want that? I mean, be honest,” (126) and “Tim, it’s a war.

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O’Brien creates this backstory for this boy. How he grew up listening to stories of his ancestors protecting their land and that it was a tradition to die fighting for your own land. But O’Brien could see that this boy was weak and tiny and young. He could see that his face was smooth with no facial hair and fingers were thin. This brought so much more guilt onto him.

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The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, illustrates the experiences of a man and his comrades throughout the war in Vietnam. Tim O’Brien actually served in the war, so he had a phenomenal background when it came to telling the true story about the war. In his novel, Tim O’Brien uses imagery to portray every necessary detail about the war and provide the reader with a true depiction of the war in Vietnam. O’Brien starts out the book by describing everything he and his comrades carry around with them during the war. Immediately once the book starts, so does his use of imagery.

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In the Book ‘The Things They Carried’ by Tim O’Brien, the author discusses the pointlessness of war, the burden of guilt and the character of Rat Kiley to dismiss the previous perspective of war previously upheld. The glorification of war was prominent before World War I due to propaganda and nationalistic views that the population followed. The novel, the things they carried, aims to disprove the heroic monomyth as O’Brien depicts the characters in his novels as riddled with self-doubt and distracted rather than the typical romanticised version of war seen in earlier texts (Baumgratner, 2017). The characters execute unnecessarily violent actions in the novel and are distracted from the war resulting in negligence which lead to consequences.

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Ambiguity Lingers On Edith Wharton, who is an American author, states “The novelist must rely on what maybe called the illuminating incident to reveal and emphasize the inner meaning of each situation” (Wharton). Tim O’Brien uses illuminating moments to show how war makes guilt ambiguous. By examining three specific moments, the reader discovers how difficult it is to deal with the ambiguities of guilt. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross suffers from the ambiguity of guilt about Ted Lavender’s death.

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Challenges at War Robert E. Lee once said, “What a cruel thing war is… to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors”. The novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien takes place in Vietnam. He and a handful of other men experience things only one can image and hope they will never have to experience again. They learn how death among them can greatly affect them, and many others. War is not an easy task to get through and these men all had different coping methods.

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“Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.” This was an illustrious quote famously said by former President John F. Kennedy. President Kennedy was addressing the United Nations General Assembly when he uttered these words. At the time, the second Secretary General of the United Nations was killed during warfare and the key suspect to his brutal murder was war. It was Kennedy’s wish to end the war before the war claimed more innocent lives.

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This quote epitomizes the trauma caused by war. O’Brien is trying to cope, mostly through writing these war stories but has yet to put it behind him. He feels guilt, grief, and responsibility, even making up possible scenarios about the life of the man he killed and the type of person he was. This

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He served in the army during the conflict in Vietnam. He saw things and experienced events that changed him internally. In "The Things They Carried", O’Brien creates a scenario that seems to have been close to his heart. He describes the death of Lavender a fellow G.I. and friend. Lavender takes tranquilizers and smokes marijuana to calm his already frayed out nerves.

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A lot happens in Tim O 'Brien short story "The Things They Carried", at first, the reader speculates what the short story is about and why it is called "The Things They Carried". The narrator Tim O 'Brien tells and describes all the things that the men have to carry while "in-country" during the Vietnam War in the1960 's. The text 's artistic value comes from its plot, characters, conflict, and style. In the plot of the story the protagonist, Tim O 'Brien starts by describing circumstances that happened while he was in Vietnam. In the beginning of "The Things They Carried" we are introduced to each character by the things they carry.

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“That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future ... Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story” (36). The Things They Carried is a captivating novel that gives an inside look at the life of a soldier in the Vietnam War through the personal stories of the author, Tim O’Brien . Having been in the middle of war, O’Brien has personal experiences to back up his opinion about the war.

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Originally published in 1990, The Things They Carried is a collection of war stories that took place during the Vietnam War. Due to its accurate and honest depiction of war, it has been banned for crude language, violence, drug use, and sexual innuendo. The author, Tim O’Brien, was born in Austin, Minnesota in 1946. Due to his service in the United States military during the Vietnam War, O’Brien is able to depict the war in a more graphic, and realistic manner.

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The presented motifs of cowardice, shame, and guilt all stem from O’Brien’s disoriented belief in pleasing society and abandoning his identity.

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