Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

War is one of the most complex yet completely understood subjects to read or write about. Tim O’Brien has captured the true essence of being drafted into a war. “The Things They Carried” is a novel composed of multiple short stories; Each taking the reader through the perspective of the narrator showing his multiple landscapes, situations, and changing feelings from being drafted into the Vietnam War to surviving it. These stories really help one understand the effects of war on someone’s mind as well as body. Tim O’Brien is the main character and protagonist in this novel. He goes from being a boy “a month after graduating from Macalester College” “drafted to fight a war I hated”(page 40) thinking he was “to good for this war”(page 41),

He tells an elaborate story with six men being out in the field, hearing noises that should not be able to be heard up in the mountaintops, and call in a strike on their location. After the strike, they head back to their base and colonel but do not say a word. O’Brien, anticipating there is a moral, asks, “’All right’ I said, ‘what’s the moral?’ ‘Forget it.’ ‘No, go ahead.’ For a long while he was quiet, looking away, and the silence kept stretching out until it was almost embarrassing. Then he shrugged and gave me a stare that lasted all day. ‘Hear that quiet, man?’ he said. ‘That quiet-just listen. There’s your moral.’”(Page 77) This can speak to everyone. There’s nothing truer than the silence in your head or the look after you’ve gone through something tragic. He is an intelligent man who likes to be funny and have fun. His humor is shown when he mails lice to his Ohio draft board. He gets very upset when others don’t tell stories “correctly” as when they tell them too slow or without enough details. He is an experienced soldier who operates the company’s

This really shows in the story, “On the Rainy River.” In this story, the narrator, Tim O’Brien, just discovers he is being drafted into the Vietnam War. He is simultaneously angry and frightened. He “felt no sense of an impeding crisis in my life. Stupidly, with a kind of smug removal that I can’t begin to fathom, I assumed that the problems of killing and dying did not fall within my special province.” (Page 41) After taking a job removing blood clots from the necks of dead pigs, he feels isolated and depressed. He suddenly has a breaking point. “It was a physical rupture- a cracking-leaking-popping feeling.”(Page 46) It is as this time he decides he wants to head to Canada and escape his draft. He stays at the “Tip Top Lodge”, a small lodge on the river separating the U.S. from Canada. There is only one other resident; an old man who seems to know his predicament, yet never speaks of it. He quickly makes friends with this old man and after a few days accompanies him on a fishing trip. At this time the man crosses to the Canadian shoreline, only twenty yards away from the boat. He turns around, bows his head away from Tim, and starts humming. At this time Tim starts to have a hallucination and is crying. He tries to jump over the boat but is unable to. “I couldn’t make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was. And right then