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Mortality And Death In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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“Doesn't matter what the press says doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the country decides something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: The requirement that we stand up for what we believe no, matter the odds or consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world. No you move.” -Captain America. Tim O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried. The protagonist is Tim O’Brien and his platoon while the antagonist is the war. The Things They Carried is a nonlinear book because you never know what is going to happen. Some of the conflicts O'Brien's platoon had to face was the weather and trying to survive Vietnam. O’Brien’s intended audience is everyone who did not experience the Vietnam War. Two of the major themes of his book were morality and mortality and death. In the chapter ‘‘In the Field’’ O’Brien uses the theme morality. In the being the soldier’s looked for Kiowa’s body. The soldiers were trying to figure out whose fault it was for Kiowa’s death. In the end, the soldiers found Kiowa’s body. “At daybreak a …show more content…

In the beginning O’Brien discusses the first time he killed a man with a grenade. O’Brien describes in vivid detail the man he just killed. At the end of the chapter Kiowa and a fellow soldier try to help O’Brien with the grief of killing a man. “Kiowa glanced at the body... you want to trade places with him?...Be honest”(O'Brien 120). Kiowa is trying to get O’Brien to cope with the death. He does this by asking him if he would rather be the dead guy. The quote connects to the theme morality and death because O’Brien has to make a choice and that leads to someone dying. O’Brien thought it was the right choice to throw the grenade and that lead to the death because it meant he

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In the book The Things They Carried Tim- O’Brien experiences many altercations that either happens to him or happens to his infantry group of soldiers. This was a nonlinear novel because the chapters jump from one subject to another. O’Brien experienced tragic lifetime events in his battle career when it came to him deciding if he was going to publish a novel or not with his twenty years of active duty. O'Brien's two themes shame/guilt and storytelling/memory was being used. The themes relate to him because these are the things he uses and experiences.

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Although the soldier he killed was an enemy soldier, instead of vilifying him he was able to humanize the man. O’Brien was able to describe the physical appearance of the soldier and imagine her life before war. The author was able to portray an emotional connection and made the line between friend and enemy almost vanish. This was able to reveal the natural beauty of shared humanity even in the context of war’s horror. O’Brien is able to find the beauty in the midst of this tragic and horrible event.

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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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The Things They Carried is a novel written by Tim O'Brien which follows the daily thoughts, actions, and moments of a company serving in the Vietnam War. The meaning of this work was to depict the gruesome images and effects of war as well as the toll it can take on people. This is executed by utilizing morally ambiguous characters, which are characters whose behavior discourages readers from identifying them as purely evi or purely good. Many characters in the book are morally ambiguous, but one, an unnamed vietcong soldier who was killed in the novel stands out the most.

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543 Words | 3 Pages

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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Death is an inevitable part of the life cycle. To bring those who are gone back to life, people must recreate their memories with the deceased through storytelling. In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien shows that when someone experiences a loss, by telling stories of the lost one it will keep them alive through the mind and help one cope with them being gone. In the first chapter, The Things They Carried, O’Brien demonstrates the theme of telling stories to cope with death by how the platoon members talk about Ted Lavender’s death, “Like cement, Kiowa whispered in the dark.

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In the chapter “The Man I Killed” O’Brien killed a man he felt should not have been killed. Kiowa helps O’Brien through it. “I'm serious. Nothing anybody could do. Come on, stop staring” (O’Brien 120).

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While in the chapter “Ambush,” O 'Brien show the reader how even after the war is over, he still feels ashamed and guilty over the death of the soldier . In Ambush O 'Brien 's daughter Kathleen asks him if he 'd ever killed anyone. She thinks that he must have because he keeps writing war stories. O’Brien, however, insists that he has never killed anyone. Reflecting on his lie, O’Brien pretends Kathleen is an adult and imagines that he tell her the entire story of My Khe.

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Even after all these years, O’Brien is still unable to get the images of Vietnam out of him head, specifically of the man he killed. In the novel, he repeats the description of the man numerous times, almost to the point of excess, saying,“he was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay with one leg bent beneath him, his jaw in his throat, his face neither expressive nor inexpressive. One eye was shut. The other was a star-shaped hole” (124).

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The grenade dealt a fatal blow. And, twenty years later, O’Brien is still living with the guilt. He doesn 't want to tell her truth just yet. After he killed the soldier Tim stated,"Even now I haven 't finished sorting it out. Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don 't"(2).

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Tim O’Brien never lies. While we realise at the end of the book that Kiowa, Mitchell Sanders and Rat Kiley are all fictional characters, O’Brien is actually trying to tell us that there is a lot more truth hidden in these imagined characters than we think. This suggests that the experiences he went through were so traumatic, the only way to describe it was through the projection of fictional characters. O’Brien explores the relationship between war experiences and storytelling by blurring the lines between truth and fiction. While storytelling can change and shape a reader’s opinions and perspective, it might also be the closest in helping O’Brien cope with the complexity of war experiences, where the concepts like moral and immorality are being distorted.

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In “Ambush” O’Brien conveys his everlasting guilt by stating “I did not hate the young man; I did not see him as the enemy; I did not ponder issues of morality or politics or military duty.” O’Brien also says “It was not a matter of live or die. There was no real peril. Almost certainly the young man would have passed by. And it will always be that way.”

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645 Words | 3 Pages

(p. 126). Though he does not see him as the enemy, O’Brien reacts as he had been taught to in war; to forget most of your morals and shoot before you can be shot first, a fact Kiowa points out to him. “Later, I remember, Kiowa tried to tell me that the man would 've died anyway. He told me that it was a good kill, that I was a soldier and this was a war, that I should shape up and stop staring and ask myself what the dead man would ' ve done if things were reversed” (p. 127). Soldiers are expected to forget their morals and act as a soldier should.

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688 Words | 3 Pages

“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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499 Words | 2 Pages

The story of the shit field keeps on being told, O'Brien does not stop talking about it in the book. O'Brien says that if a story keeps on coming back, it might show that it is a true war story, "You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end," (72). PTSD, the effects of the story do not lessen. So it's always replaying in the mind. Like the person would never forget that one story, because he knows that it was his fault and it haunts him.

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