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Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien, the author, narrator, and main character, obviously portrays many roles. He writes the novel as a way to endure all of his pain and suffering that he experiences in Vietnam. O’Brien narrates the war from his perspective, expressing many obstacles that he has to overcome, such as: swallowing his integrity to go to war, debating if he should tell his daughter the truth about the war, and lamenting all of his problems that the war caused him. O’Brien does not agree with the war. He says, “I was drafted into a war that I hated…but even so the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.” (O’Brien 38). He believes that the war is irrelevant. Then, after he is drafted into the war, he begins considering traveling to cross the Canadian border to elude the war. He is in a perpetual, moral battle with himself on if he should do it or not. It is a great representation of how horrid war is that someone is willing to throw his whole life away just to avoid it. …show more content…

Being that she is too young, O’Brien feels the need to preserve the innocence of his daughter from the abominations of the war. He lies to her and tells her that he has never killed anyone before, and then he writes this story to deal with his guilt. He says, “Someday, I hope, she’ll ask again. But here I want to pretend she’s a grown-up.” (O’Brien 124). This quote expresses how much O’Brien dislikes lying to his daughter, but he knows that she is too young to apprehend; therefore, to deal with his pain, he writes this story where he pretends that she is older so that he can explain to her what actually

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Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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By using lucid imagery, the reader can easily place themselves in the scene with O’Brien. It is evident that O’Brien is enduring great guilt because of his spontaneous and involuntary action. O’Brien can remember the minor details of how he killed the young man, making it evident to the reader that O’Brien possibly suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. O’Brien also states on page 118, “He had been born, maybe, in 1946 in the village of My Khe… He was not a Communist.

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Things They Carried By Tim O Brien: An Analysis

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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

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The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, illustrates the experiences of a man and his comrades throughout the war in Vietnam. Tim O’Brien actually served in the war, so he had a phenomenal background when it came to telling the true story about the war. In his novel, Tim O’Brien uses imagery to portray every necessary detail about the war and provide the reader with a true depiction of the war in Vietnam. O’Brien starts out the book by describing everything he and his comrades carry around with them during the war. Immediately once the book starts, so does his use of imagery.

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Imagination interferes with acknowledging literal reality. When describing storytelling, the narrator, O’Brien says:

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The Things They Carried In the historical fiction The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien presents himself, the narrator, being faced with a war draft to a war he didn't agree with, in order to convey a message about going to war instead of fleeing the draft ultimately illustrating that message of being a coward for going against what he believed in. Tim O’Brien conveys a message of himself being a coward for going against what he believed in. In the text Tim had recently graduated from college when he got drafted to the war, O’Brien stated “In June of 1968, a month after graduating from Macalester College, I was drafted to fight a war I hated.” O’Brien makes it extremely clear that his views did not align with the war.

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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.

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O’Brien tells the readers about him reflecting back twenty years ago, he wonders if running away from the war were just events that happened in another dimension, he pictures himself writing a letter to his parents: “I’m finishing up a letter to my Parents that tells what I'm about to do and why I'm doing it and how sorry I am that I’d never found the courage to talk to them about it”(O’Brien 80). Even twenty years after his running from the war, O’Brien still feels sorry for not finding the courage to tell his parents about his decision of escaping to Canada to start a new life. O’Brien presented his outlook that even if someone was not directly involved in the war, this event had impacted them indirectly, for instance, how a person’s reaction to the war can create regret for important friends and

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This quote epitomizes the trauma caused by war. O’Brien is trying to cope, mostly through writing these war stories but has yet to put it behind him. He feels guilt, grief, and responsibility, even making up possible scenarios about the life of the man he killed and the type of person he was. This

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“O’Brien pretends Kathleen is an adult and imagines that he might tell her the entire story of My Khe”(813). O’Brien still remembers a number of events from twenty years ago when he was in a war. When he is alone, he still sees a young man walking through the fog with a weapon. O’Brien recounts stories through first person still imaging them like they are happening over and over again and he cannot get the images out of his head. He writes about events in the war which it makes his daughter, Kathleen, worry about him and is concerned about what he is going through.

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The Things They Carried is a novel written by Tim O’Brien; in this novel, O’Brien explores a blurred line between reality and fiction. This subjection of truth to storytelling is a major theme throughout the novel, which means that telling war stories objectively makes the story less pertinent. This theme shows that O’Brien is not attempting to tell a war story, but to just talk about the experiences he had while at war. He shows that any facts throughout the novel are not as important as the stories and experiences he tells of, and how what the war meant to the soldiers and how it changed them. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is an autobiographical fiction novel which investigates the obscure line between fact and fiction with his characters

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