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The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien Summary

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Tim O’brien’s historical fiction book The Things They Carried is focused around soldiers involved in the Vietnam War. This war was a difficult time for both the Americans who were drafted to fight in the war as well as for those who were at home and disagreed with the idea of currently being in war in Vietnam. As he writes about his own fictional experiences during the war along with the stories of many other fellow troops, O’brien expresses that it is difficult to “tell a true war story”. With the use of imagination and invention, he is able to successfully convey the difficulties involving truth-telling and wartime conditions. O’brien is open with his intended audience and blatantly states that it is hard to tell a true war story. He believes that this is because the true stories tend to often blend together with the false stories. It is possible that a …show more content…

Instead of just giving a complete summary of everything that happened, he uses a technique that his literal words are meant to symbolize something. Each physical item that a soldier carries represents an idea. For example, the repeated statements about how they all carry a good amount of weight in guns and utilities represents the idea that they have necessities for defending themselves in the war. Along with these weapons and the other necessities like food, O’brien also focuses on how the men had certain superstitious items that they carried with them. For example, Henry Dobbins carried his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck because he believed that it gave him good luck while he was at war. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried the pictures and letters from Martha as a way to remind himself what mattered to him and to get him through the war. O’brien described something that each soldier carried as a way to build their character for the readers to

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845 Words | 4 Pages

In the 1990 book “The Things They Carried” By Tim O’Brien gives both the victims and survivors of the Vietnam war a voice. The soldiers, alive and dead, experienced horrific events too terrible to speak of. No one could express their emotions, causing many mental illnesses such as PTSD. How could they express how they felt if they couldn’t speak of the horrors that occurred? Tim O’Brien gave them a voice.

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670 Words | 3 Pages

The short story “The Things They Carried”, by Tim O’Brien, is about the experience of a team of American soldiers in the Vietnam war (Julia Guance et al. 323). O’Brien fought in the war of Vietnam himself and used writing as a way to express the realities of war (322). His works are realistic, given his personal experience at war. Each soldier in the story “The Things They Carried” carry specific objects that reflect their personality and priorities. Jimmy Cross is a twenty-four-year-old, American First Lieutenant.

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In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried the narrator, Tim O’Brien, often blurs the lines between reality and fiction. As a young soldier, O’Brien recalls the Vietnam war including the sounds, sights, and his emotions, while 20 years later he again shares his feelings and experiences of the same event. This same event, however, is told differently in order to help him cope with the emotional pain of war. The details become blurry as the pain is too great to endure.

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The soldiers during the war carried many things, most of them from back home. The first chapter of The Things They Carried starts out the book by showing how the things the soldiers carried. It also went into depth about the feelings and emotions they carried. After all, they were human, they carried feelings such as fear, grief, love, dignity, and terror. The things they carried reflected their personality, and what mattered in their lives back home.

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841 Words | 4 Pages

Tim O’Brien writes us a wonderful fictional tale of a platoon of men in vietnam during the vietnam war, The Things They Carried shows the reader that when the men are over in this distant and strange land, not only do they carry physical objects, but emotional baggage and ideas that truly make, or break a man in war. Tim and his men show several signs of stress and turmoil while fighting the war, and while they survive they begin to understand what is really means to live, die, and what is right, and wrong. While over in vietnam the men are in a war, not a simple skirmish or fight, but a full on war against an enemy that they were not sure they are the enemy. The men would walk from location from location seeing what there is to do and trying

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516 Words | 3 Pages

In the novel The Thing They Carry the book it depicts the many issues a person faces going to the war and problems they face during the war. At the beginning of the book we are introduced to Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and a girl named Martha back home whom writes to him. These letters and one-sided love blinded the Lieutenant which resulted in the death of one of his men. He had the responsibility of keeping his men safe and making sure they were gonna get out of the war alive. However, his feeling towards Martha got the best of him which got Ted Lavender killed.

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1271 Words | 6 Pages

The Things They Carried, a novel by Tim O’Brien and published in 2009, examines what it was like to have fought in the Vietnam War, through memory, imagination, and the powerful ability of storytelling. Throughout his book O’Brien writes a series of vignettes and describes what it was like during the war, and the effects it had on him a decade later. There was one part in particular that really caught my attention. In the chapter,“How to Tell a True War Story”, O’Brien mentions how Rat Kiley, a Vietnam soldier, writes a letter and he was not pleased with the outcome. As I am sitting on my bed reading one of the chapters in the novel, “How to Tell a True War Story,” I begin to see a flashback of my own life.

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Tim O’Brien, author of “The Things They Carried”, tells a war tale which contains no heroes because his story showcases the blunt reality of war. Many men, in the past, did not go to war to become heroes; rather they were forced to enlist because of the military draft or because they felt cowardly due to the expectations of society. Tim O’Brien chose to share his story because he wanted non-military civilians to learn the truth about war; the realistic side of war that the news and Hollywood films won’t show you. War is hell; it is painful, traumatizing, and completely life changing, to say the least. In my opinion, O’Brien gives readers an inside look and understanding of how there are no heroes of war, because fighting for a cause that

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1043 Words | 5 Pages

The book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is about the Vietnam War and the physical and mental burdens that soldiers carried, but it is not just about the violence of war, it is also a love story. O’ Brien interweaves the characters of Mary Anne, Martha and Kathleen into the novel in sporadic ways that at first it just seems random, but it is done that way to remind the reader that sometimes there is no war without love, and that is the role of the women in this story. Each one of them serves the purpose of being a beacon of light that shines through the darkness that is war. One of the most influential female in O’Brien’s story is Kathleen, his ten year old daughter. She is one of the reasons that O’Brien explains his war experience

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1078 Words | 5 Pages

The novel, “The Things They Carried”, is written by Tim O’Brien and is composed of short stories about O’Brien’s “experiences” in war. The setting is placed in various locations, but mainly around the 1950’s in Vietnam. Through his non-chronological stories, the reader learns about O’Brien’s experiences in the war along with the soldiers who were in his platoon. Through the book, we see both a memoir of the war and an autobiography, however, the book is considered fictional because of his storytelling technique. He writes how a true war story is hard to tell and elucidates the connection between storytelling and his war experience.

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1067 Words | 5 Pages

Reza Mirza A 4 Real Stories Out of Imagination “What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can make myself feel again” (172). In The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, many fictional stories take place to show the reader the feelings he had felt in the war. Rat Kiley is the American Alpha Company nineteen-year-old medic.

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512 Words | 3 Pages

In his novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien explores the power of storytelling as a means of conveying the complex experiences of soldiers in the Vietnam War. Throughout the novel, O’Brien distinguishes between "Happening Truth," which refers to objective facts of events, and "Story Truth," which refers to the subjective emotional and psychological realities of those events. Through the use of these two concepts, O’Brien creates a series of interconnected stories that blur the line between fact and fiction, and ultimately serves as a testament to the enduring power of storytelling itself. The novel is comprised of a series of interconnected stories, each of which focuses on a particular aspect of the Vietnam War.

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1423 Words | 6 Pages

In his novel, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien aims to convey his experience fighting in the Vietnam War. This subject is very difficult to write about, because many readers have never gone through anything like this – O’Brien is showing them a world that seems completely foreign. Throughout the novel, he portrays people from different backgrounds, all of them deeply human, living through and contributing to something that goes against the very foundations of humanity. In order to be able to convey this disparity, he needs to use every tool available to him, including bending the truth.

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1413 Words | 6 Pages

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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688 Words | 3 Pages

“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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