ipl-logo

Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

587 Words3 Pages

The role of story telling in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is almost as complex as figuring out a riddle. There are meanings hid within meanings of a story, which makes it hard to understand the importance of a specific story trying to be told. Stories not only play an important role in this novel, but also for many people in real life. Author Tim O’Brien believes that: “story telling has the power to give life to those that have passed on” (O’Brien). The concept in this novel tells a story, which is in the actual text of the novel, but there is also a hidden story within that story. The novel suggests that it is important to continue to tell stories; by doing so someone’s life lives on, someone’s legacy lives on, someone’s contribution to our world lives on. Through stories, generations of people will learn about tales of survival, triumph, and failure. By listening to the stories in the novel readers are challenged by having to decide whether the author is telling a true war story, based upon its detail, or one that is not true. Tim O’Brien does this by not having a clear fence between non-fiction and fiction, he believed that: “telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the throat…it was a way of grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what happened to me…all the mistakes id made, all the terrible things I had seen and done” …show more content…

Specifically in this novel, stories played a large role, which was to distract the minds of uneasy soldiers. Distract their minds from the possibility of death, their obligations, and whether or not they’d make it back home. When receiving a letter from a friend named, Norman Bowker about his guilt, O’Brien took this opportunity to support his belief that the most important part of a story is not its truth, but how the story makes one

Show More
Related
516 Words | 3 Pages

This phase out of the book The Things They Carried, shows how important a detailed description is. Having read the fictional story about Tim O’Brien’s experience in the Vietnam War, can really set off that emotional connection because it makes you feel like you are really

Read More
248 Words | 1 Pages

This demonstrates how the focus of the reading is to define how a true war story is not about the war. Another way O’Brien establishes the main idea of a war story not being about the war is the different narratives he uses. One

Read More
1887 Words | 8 Pages

“Make plain to them the excellence of killing / And a field where a thousand corpses lie” (Crane 21-22). The poem “War is Kind” shows that the soldiers are brainwashed to believe that it is a good thing to kill, but in contrast, many soldiers return from war scarred from the mentally exhausting tasks that they endure. Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, is a collection of short stories that expresses the experiences and feelings of a platoon of American soldiers facing combat in the jungles of Vietnam. The characters endure heartbreak and hardships that change them as people and will carry with themselves after the war. In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, O’Brien reveals how the mindset of soldiers changes when guilt,

Read More
650 Words | 3 Pages

O’Brien tells many stories about death, friends, and times during the war. These stories are all fiction because in the novel O’Brien is his own main character making the novel a fiction due to the changes in the stories and people. O’Brien consistently reminds his readers that the stories in his book are fiction, but explaining that stories

Read More
833 Words | 4 Pages

Both a novel and a collection of interrelated short stories, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is a book that emerges from a complex variety of literary standards. O'Brien presents to his readers both a war journal and a writer's autobiography, and complicates this presentation by creating a fictional protagonist who shares his name. To fully comprehend and appreciate the novel, particularly the passages that gloss the nature of writing and storytelling, it is important to remember that the work is fictional rather than a conventional non-fiction, historical account. Protagonist "Tim O'Brien" is a middle-aged writer and Vietnam War veteran. The primary action of the novel is "O'Brien's" remembering the past and working and reworking the

Read More
1094 Words | 5 Pages

Storytelling has such a large impact on all stages of life. Stories are told to teach a lesson, give hope, or get someone through a hard time. Tim O’Brien uses storytelling in his book, The Things They Carried, to teach lessons from war, and help readers understand about the baggage people bring to war. The publisher section of this novel has this warning in it, "This is a work of fiction. Except for a few details regarding the author's own life all incidents, names, and characters are imaginary” (O'Brien).

Read More
550 Words | 3 Pages

Partly catharsis, partly communication, it was a way of grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what had happened to me” (O’Brien 151-152). Tim explains the feeling of what writing a war story does to him. Writing war stories for the world to see helped him cope with the trauma of the war. It helps him express his emotions and establish a barrier from the atrocities he had witnessed. Tim O’Brien uses his passion of writing to cope with the trauma and atrocities, it helps him settle his grief and

Read More
1057 Words | 5 Pages

A storyteller invents comprehensible facts to fill in a story’s missing aspects. O’Brien continues to elaborate by explaining how “The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed” (O’Brien 67). Again, as a soldier, especially in the Vietnam War, it proves difficult to realize what actually occurs and find the ability to remember specific details to completely and precisely retell it some time afterwards. Tim implies imagination’s role when he writes, “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.

Read More
1874 Words | 8 Pages

Tim O'brien's novel The Things They Carried follows Tim through his experiences as a soldier in the Vietnam War. Before going to war, Tim debates escaping his draft by running away to Canada. Before telling this story, he prefaces, “This is one story I've never told before. For more than twenty years I've had to live with it, feeling the shame, trying to push it away, and so by this act of remembrance, by putting the facts down on paper, I'm hoping to relieve at least some of the pressure on my dreams” (37). O’brien expresses that for much of his life he has bottled up the emotions that come along with telling this story.

Read More
941 Words | 4 Pages

His purpose in writing this novel was to help readers understand what was going on in the Vietnam war. Tim O’Brien uses themes storytelling and shame/guilt to help people who wanted to know about the Vietnam war understand how the soldiers felt. In the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien uses the theme storytelling to show that a

Read More
223 Words | 1 Pages

In the book O’Brien uses imagery, figurative language and repetition to put across his message. His purpose for the story telling, is to clear his conscience of war and to tell the stories of soldiers who were forgotten by society. The narrator was against the war. In The Things They Carried.

Read More
1284 Words | 6 Pages

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.

Read More
499 Words | 2 Pages

The Things They Carried shows the significance of storytelling. Throughout the entire book, storytelling is almost the main thing. Tim O'brien shares most of his stories, and so do the other characters. Some stories were good and some were bad. Without the storytelling in the book, it would just be plain.

Read More
480 Words | 2 Pages

According to O’Brien, you only “tell a true war story” “if you just keep on telling it”.(The Things They Carried 91). For O’Brien it is not the facts that makes a story worth remembering, but that a story becomes part of the present so “there is nothing to remember except the story”( The Things They Carried

Read More
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.

Read More

More about Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

Related Topics

Open Document