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The Man I Killed Literary Analysis

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“Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker... - slog through the emptiness and dangers of their Vietnam tour in this haunting and acclaimed collection …” (Tim O’Brien). By just reading the synopsis of The Thing They Carried on the back of the cover, it is presumably believed that the book is about a platoon of heroic and glorious American soldiers, who fought in the Vietnam War. However, there is no mention of any primary Vietnamese characters except for the chapters “The Man I Killed,” and “Style.” On the whole, the perceptions and experiences of American soldiers are reflected throughout the book. The absence of the Vietnamese characters from the rest of the text raises essential questions about the main purpose of the narrative for writing and distinction …show more content…

By using the ability of fiction to resist to death, the American soldiers could "[keep] the dead alive with stories" during the time of war (O’Brien 230). The ambiguous storytelling serves the purpose of immortalizing the memories while remembering causes forgetting. "That 's what a story does. The bodies are animated. You make the dead talk" (O’Brien 232). The chapter “The Lives of The Death” distinguishes among all chapters in a way that it indicates the attempt of O’Brien to return the people he lost to the world though dreaming, which is the most basic form of storytelling. “I keep dreaming Linda alive. And Ted Lavender, too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and a slim young man I killed…” (O’Brien 221). All the people become immortal on the pages of The Things They Carried. By breaking the limits of life, the characters become sensory and tangible with the help of animation and memorializing. This imagination and storytelling can be associated with escapism to draw comfort and not confront with the harsh reality itself. The death of Linda is an example of preservation of his memories to deal with the grief of his losses. After Linda dies, she begins to appear in O’Brien’s dreams and illuminates the message that “it doesn’t matter” (O’Brien 27), whether she is dead or not. O’Brien feels the necessity of telling stories and daydreaming Linda to deal with his traumatic

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Men went through so many tasks during the Vietnam War physically and mentally. The beginning chapters focus on training for war and being prepared for the worst. For example, when there is a sergeant in a room with the marines. The sergeant walks to the chalk board and writes “AMBUSHES ARE MURDER AND MURDER IS FUN” (36-37). The

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The lives of soldiers, Norman Bowker and Curt Lemon, illustrate how the war pressures the human spirit to a standard it can’t resemble. The pressure and responsibilities of lost friends and lost acts of courage heavily weigh Norman Bowker down,

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Readers, especially those reading historical fiction, always crave to find believable stories and realistic characters. Tim O’Brien gives them this in “The Things They Carried.” Like war, people and their stories are often complex. This novel is a collection stories that include these complex characters and their in depth stories, both of which are essential when telling stories of the Vietnam War. Using techniques common to postmodern writers, literary techniques, and a collection of emotional truths, O’Brien helps readers understand a wide perspective from the war, which ultimately makes the fictional stories he tells more believable.

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In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the author retells the chilling, and oftentimes gruesome, experiences of the Vietnam war. He utilizes many anecdotes and other rhetorical devices in his stories to paint the image of what war is really like to people who have never experienced it. In the short stories “Spin,” “The Man I Killed,” and “ ,” O’Brien gives reader the perfect understanding of the Vietnam by placing them directly into the war itself. In “Spin,” O’Brien expresses the general theme of war being boring and unpredictable, as well as the soldiers being young and unpredictable.

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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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Human beings often claim to be searching for the truth. The truth often entails finding the right answer, choice, or formula. The search for truth develops a tendency to settle for the easiest choice—a false truth; more often than not, a false truth goes unquestioned in order to remain benighted. Concerning the false truth in The Things They Carried, information—specifically memories, must be sorted into two categories: those stories that are true and those which are simply glorified recreational war stories. It would be a near impossible task due to the extent that the tales mix.

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It is a way to carry their presence, and for the writers and listeners of the stories to feel as if they are still right next to them. O’Brien often refers to his stories as dreaming, “They’re all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world” (225). This shows the similarities between dreaming and storytelling. Both are ways of keeping the dead alive, and ways to ensure that they’re not forgotten.

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In November of 1955, the United States entered arguably one of the most horrific and violent wars in history. The Vietnam War is documented as having claimed about 58,000 American lives and more than 3 million Vietnamese lives. Soldiers and innocent civilians alike were brutally slain and tortured. The atrocities of such a war are near incomprehensible to those who didn’t experience it firsthand. For this reason, Tim O’Brien, Vietnam War veteran, tries to bring to light the true horrors of war in his fiction novel The Things They Carried.

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The use of a ‘dead’ end shows that the thought of dying is on his subconscious. It also ties in with the warmth spilling out as he becomes cold just a dead body would. In summary, the images O’Brien uses in this passage are very much surreal and no doubtedly prove that he uses surrealism in his work. He does so in a meaningful manner to give insight to his character’s subconscious thoughts just as the definition

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Synthesis Essay In the Vietnam war, there were many soldiers at war with each other, and most soldiers were not prepared for the fight. In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien was in the Vietnam war when he was young. The book was not in order but he still talks about his experiences while in the war. His purpose for writing this novel was because he wanted younger audience to know what happened in the war and what the soldiers experienced.

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“The Man I Killed”, O’Brien imagines what the man’s life was like before he came to the war. The whole time, Tim O’Brien seems to be in a state of shock and he goes back and forth between describing the man’s life and describing the dead body. “Ambush” is set in the present and O’Brien is asked by his daughter if he ever killed someone. He tells her no then goes into a scenario in his mind of if she had been an adult; he imagines telling her of the man he killed from start to finish.

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Hidden somewhere within the blurred lines of fiction and reality, lies a great war story trapped in the mind of a veteran. On a day to day basis, most are not willing to murder someone, but in the Vietnam War, America’s youth population was forced to after being pulled in by the draft. Author Tim O’Brien expertly blends the lines between fiction, reality, and their effects on psychological viewpoints in the series of short stories embedded within his novel, The Things They Carried. He forces the reader to rethink the purpose of storytelling and breaks down not only what it means to be human, but how mortality and experience influence the way we see our world. In general, he attempts to question why we choose to tell the stories in the way

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The Vietnam War leaves a legacy of moral confusion with each and every soldier who serves. Soldiers are fighting for a cause they do not necessarily believe in, killing people who do not necessarily deserve it, and watching their brothers die beside them. Tim O’Briens’ book, The Things They Carried, illustrates the soldiers struggle to define morality throughout the confusion of the war. On the Rainy River, Tim O’Brien faces what he feels is his moral obligation to answer his country’s call and fight in Vietnam, and a personal moral issue with the reason for the war.

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“That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future ... Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story” (36). The Things They Carried is a captivating novel that gives an inside look at the life of a soldier in the Vietnam War through the personal stories of the author, Tim O’Brien . Having been in the middle of war, O’Brien has personal experiences to back up his opinion about the war.

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Obrien keeps the deceased characters Linda, Kiowa, Ted Lavender, Curt and Timmy alive, through his memories, dreams and stories. In Tim O’Brien’s “Lives of the Dead,” the loss of innocence and the power of literacy are both prevalent themes. Symbols are often used in a story to mean more than its literary meaning; Linda’s red cap, in “Lives of the Dead,” is a symbol of innocence’s. Linda’s innocence affected neither her illness nor death. Linda was O’Brien’s childhood girlfriend; when she first found out she was sick and had cancer, she began to wear a red cap, every day.

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