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Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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Imagine what war looks like. An image of suffering, grief, guilt, torture. The story, while set in Vietnam, is just as relevant today with the conflicts we have. Tim O’Brien, the main character, had to go through all the discomfort that comes with war. Even with all of the external and physical battles, the real conflict might just be inside the soldier. O’Brien creates a series of short narratives about a small group of soldiers, using a mixture of fiction and autobiographical facts. Over the course of the novel The Things They Carried By Tim O’Brien, Tim’s experiences and interaction with his platoon; provides a view of war and it distractions At the begging, Tim O’Brien enters the war as a immature kid, but by the end, he becomes a fearless …show more content…

On one rainy day Tim and his platoon came across a young Viennese soldier on a dirt trail. After the event Tim Admits, “I was terrified. There were no thoughts about killing. The grenade was to make him go away—just evaporate—and I leaned back and felt my mind go empty and then felt it fill up again(173).” This is one interaction that Tim had faced, which had a big impact on him. O’Brien had never felt so guilty in his life. With the pain that he went through the other chapters were there to help him. Tim O’Brien is only a actively participant in three of the war stories; The Man I Killed, In the Field, and Ghost Soldiers. In the story “The Man I killed,” Tim becomes super guilty and mad at himself for killing a young soldier. “In the Field” O’Brien also becomes guilty because he inadvertently caused the death of Kiowa. In “Ghost Soldiers” Tim and one of his friends, try to scare bobby Jorgensen, another man of the platoon. O’Brien and Bobby don't always get along very well, so Tim tried his best to frighten Jorgensen. In most of the stories Tim O’Brien is just a spectator. Some stories involve Tim at all, and we don't know if he was even there or not, but we can assume since he's writing about it. In most of the war stories Tim is a spectator, but his interactions with other characters mostly lead to guilt and weakness. Tim O’Brien’s purpose in the things we

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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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Tim O'Brien, an extremely talented and acclaimed writer of the award winning novel, The Things They Carried, has an extraordinary writing style, which seems to cloud the line between fact and fiction. He challenges his readers to consider more profound interpretations about truth and memory, and guides the readers closer to the center of the character’s experiences. The Things They Carried is not just a story about fighting in a war, but also about fighting the war going on inside one’s self. The book's dominant idea is just as pertinent today as it was many years ago; touching the hearts of all types of people from all different walks of life.

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