War, destruction, devastation: all of these words have a similar connotation which all tend to lead to an unfavorable outcome. In The Things They Carried, the author, Tim O'Brien, describes a scene where new army recruits are deployed to a jungle-like area in Vietnam. The author makes use of various devices to describe this scene, specifically simile, imagery, and syntax to explain how it relates to the mood of the novel, a particularly difficult feat given that the author must convey these feelings through words. The author uses similes to describe the setting. In any writing one phase can make all the difference, it can complete the mental picture the author is trying to create; or it can encapsulate the intention of the author. “They moved like mules.”: the author uses this statement to describe how the soldiers would appear to onlookers: they carry a heavy burden with an absurdly large amounts of supplies, like pack animals. Most readers would think, “why did the author compare them to mules?” The author most likely does this because the first image that comes to mind when you hear the word mule: an over worked pack …show more content…
The author says ”they shared the weight of memory." For the majority of the passage, the author describe mostly things you would find in their packs, such as food rations, bullets, and sand bags, but this brief phase contrasts the rest of the passage. The author carefully describes what they carried and its weight, then he suddenly mentions something that can neither be weighed nor seen. The author most likely does this in order to help the reader imagine the situation. These soldiers are carrying everything they can possibly hold, and then they must also carry a mental weight. The horrific things they bore witness to will become a shared