Significant Themes In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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In the short story, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, one of the many significant themes that O’Brien uses are that the soldiers had to hold what was within them and it was the guilt. One of the examples in the novel is that, O’Brien specifically puts in detail how most of the soldiers had something haunting them. The back of their mind they were thinking and looking for someone to blame for something they have caused. They were so guilty of the many deaths of the war that it had physically traumatized them. All they could think of was the deaths of the comrades and the deaths of the North Vietnamese soldiers. Throughout the novel, O’Brien shows that Guilt and Blame were themes in the book. For Lieutenant Cross, he carried the guilt.