Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

Author and war veteran Tim O’Brien, in his novel The Things They Carried, unveils the struggles and obstacles that soldiers are faced with. What they must overcome will help them gain back the life they used to live. The combination of the moral and emotional struggles, along with the memories that are trapped within them, make their lives tough to get back. The constant battle between themselves and the memories they have experienced, develops a barrier for soldiers to go against to gain back their lives from before. The struggle of war is more than a physical struggle. It is the emotional and moral struggles that weigh soldiers down even after the war. In O’Brien’s chapter “On the Rainy River,” he experiences different thoughts on whether

The battle within himself leads him to say, “I feared the war, yes, but I also feared exile. I was afraid of walking away from my own life, my friends and family, my whole history, everything mattered to me. I feared losing the respect of my parents. I feared the law” (O’Brien 42). The moral struggle that he was faced with was the concept of leaving everything for a war he did not even agree with. Fighting for something he did not feel strongly about, and potentially losing everything he had. He was internally conflicted, “Twenty one years old, an ordinary kid with all the ordinary dreams ad ambitions, and all I wanted was the live the life I was born to- a mainstream life-I loved baseball and hamburgers and cherry coke- and now I was off the margins of exile, leaving my country forever, and it all seemed so grotesque and terrible and sad” (O’Brien 48).

In the chapter “The Things They Carried,” O’Brien expressed the things that the soldiers take with them and how it affects them. Being away from his family and the girl he loves, was emotionally draining and very hard for him. The narrator states that, “more than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her” (O’Brien 1). Being away from the one he loved, made it impossible to try to grow the relationship and make her love him just like he loves her. The emotional drain of missing the ones you love during war is something that many of the soldiers were affected by. All of the thing that they were missing from their lives, or were encountering during war were things that could never leave their minds. The narrator claims that, “Grief, terror, love, longing- these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight” (O’Brien 20). Everything they see, somehow reminds them of their home and what they are missing out on. The people they love, the people they left, and how much better their lives are than his. The emotional struggles are the things that stay with them during the war, and long