Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

The antagonizing adversity, the convoluted hardships, and the reassuring lies – a war story that engulfs its audience in morality by tapping into a soldier’s inner memories back in the Vietnam War. The memories that Tim O’Brien possesses are documented in The Things They Carried, as it details the tragedy of mindlessly wandering on the battlefield with the disturbing thought of possibly being dead in seconds while carrying the burdens of the companions who died. It is a tragedy from the perspective of insiders versus outsiders, as one persists while the other watches them mourn their lives. Looking back to old memories like a distant friend, Tim O’Brien compounds fear, friendship, and falsehoods to retell his experiences as an American soldier to demonstrate that we are human individuals coping

A war that brought catastrophe to every soldier as this was not the war everyone anticipated. Reflecting on a memory of when O’Brien received a draft letter, he soon realizes his life was set in stone as a soldier in “On the Rainy River.” He internalizes that joining the war was not his interest, “The draft notice arrived on June 17, 1968. The sight of blood made me queasy, and I couldn’t tolerate authorities, and I didn’t know a rifle from a slingshot” (39-40). An insider like O’Brien burdens himself with the thought of not being capable of fighting a war because he is afraid of the possible outcome. Unfortunately, he is not alone in this troubling thought, as everyone carries this burden. When O’Brien encounters the man he killed as a soldier, he remorses for the Vietnamese soldier because O’Brien knows this was not a fight that the soldier wanted, “Even as a boy growing up in the village of My Khe, he had often worried about this. But all he could do, he thought, was wait and pray and try not to grow up too fast”