Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

The Things They Carried is a work of American literature written by Tim O'Brien. In the literature, Tim expresses the importance of storytelling a lot, particularly when telling war stories. Storytelling can give a huge impact if done correctly, and that’s what Tim has done in this novel. The idea of storytelling is examined over and over again in the book when Tim begins most of his chapters, including “On the Rainy River” and “How to Tell a True War Story,” by saying things like “This is one story I’ve never told before” (O’Brien, 37). Him starting off with statements like that make the reader intrigued and skeptic, almost believing what he will be saying is true. Tim conveys the necessity of blending truth and fiction. Tim examines the

Tim say that, because a war story must not have morals, you can tell a “war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.” He gives an example by telling a “true” story about Rat Kiley, a soldier whom he is friends with in the novel. Rat Kiley is a soldier who had lost his best friend in a war. His best friend was his only other half. He was a person Rat could connected with deeply. Losing him in the way that he did, was too traumatizing, and he just could not take it. He writes an emotional, hearted letter to his best friend’s sister, and after waiting for two months, he finds that his best friend's sister never wrote back. He becomes frustrated and angry, calling her a “cooze” instead of a calling her a women or a girl. Being a nineteen year old, it was all “too much for him” (O’Brien, 66). This example Tim gave was powerful and showed how evil and crushing things like war can be. And how powerful storytelling can be. Tim gives us the “truth” through

To somewhat ease his grieves, he makes up backgrounds of a dead people to connect with them. For an example, in “The Man I Killed,” Tim tells a story of when he killed a Vietnamese soldier with a grenade. Tim did not want to “kill” him, but to protect himself from dying, and to make him just “disappear.” In the story, Tim repeats the same details about the man he killed over and over again, becoming fixated on the details. In the Vietnamese man's pockets, they find a photograph of a women that may have possibly been the man's lover. Tim then imagines what the man’s life must have been like. He creates a whole fictional biography of the man: He was always afraid of war after hearing bad news of war heroes in his village. He never thought he could become a hero himself, he was a scholar who loved math, and he avoided things like politics. As a punishment for what he did, he creates these stories and feels very guilty. He stares at the dead body and then notices beautiful small flowers near the man's head, and a white butterfly flying around his mouth. The image of the beautiful flowers and butterfly were ironic. Although as gruesome as death looked, life still exists. It tells us, the “The Man I Killed,” wasn't about the gruesomeness of death but the beauty of life. Life goes