Responsibility In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

Have you ever done something wrong? Did you try to place blame other places until eventually coming to the conclusion that it’s your fault? Of course you have your human. We try to do anything to get rid of that guilty feeling that comes from our conscious. This is also happening to the soldiers of Alpha Company in Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried, especially after one of their men dies in combat. In the Novel The Things They Carried it starts off by talking about the things the men carry physically, mentally and emotionally. Throughout the book It gives many examples of how they carry emotional things such as guilt. It also talks about things they literally carry like their guns, things from loved ones and anything they need

This shows that he is mad at himself for thinking about her and making her his number one priority over his men. That’s why he burned those letters to try to forget about her. Jimmy Cross holds himself more accountable for the deaths because he is the lieutenant and thinks it's his job to keep them all safe even though he wants nothing to do with war. Cross believes that he has let his men down when they die because all he can do is think about Martha and how she is from another “world” and how her life seems to be better than his. She is naive or rather uneducated about the things happening in the

He goes back and fourth with himself for several minutes before going on to say what it is you can blame. From his standpoint, there are many things that can be blamed these are just a few. Tim O'Brien says, “When a man died there has to be blame…. you could blame the war. You could blame the idiot who made war you could blame Kiowa for going for it. (169). You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar round. You could blame the people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame God. You could blame the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate or an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote.” (170) “In a field, though, the causes were immediate. A moment of carelessness or bad judgement or plain stupidity carried consequences that lasted forever.” (170) This quote shows some of the many things you could blame some of them being things that Lieutenant Jimmy Cross often did blame until coming to the realization that it's his fault that his men died. This was often because he is carelessly thinking about Martha, or because of other careless unguided thoughts. He should have instead been looking out for his men. Telling them what it is they should and shouldn't be doing. He learns to hold himself more accountable for