The Things They Carried By Tim Obrien Analysis

Question – How and to what extent does Tim Obrien’s portrayal of the Vietnam war in his anthology of short stories, ‘The Things They Carried’, condemn or condone the soldiers actions?

Tim Obrien’s, ‘The Things They Carried’ published in 1990, represents the experience of a group of veterans in the Vietnam War through a series of short stories ranging from short anecdotes about friendships to the authors own struggle with guilt and morality. In the story, ‘How to tell a true war story’, Obrien explores the violence and war atrocities committed and experienced by the war veterans and sheds light on their nature in relation to morality. Tim O'Brien's representation of violence and war atrocities both condemns and condones the actions of Vietnam

By representing examples of needless violence against animals, Obrien juggles personal loss and grief of the veterans with the commitment of inessential graphic acts as coping mechanisms. In ‘How to tell a true water story’ following the death of Curt Lemon (one of the platoon members), his best friend, Rat Kiley struggles with his grief and brutally abuses and kills a baby VC water buffalo. The overly descriptive factual and blunt, matter of fact tone description of this event, insinuates how the soldiers were desensitised and detached to violence and positions the audience to sympathise with the soldiers’ actions despite them being arguably morally wrong. The repetition of the sentence structure ‘He…’ for example ‘He shot off the tail,’ and ‘He shot away chunks of meat around the rib,’ in conjunction with the continuous use of short sentences when describing the disfiguration of the buffalo, creates an almost can’t look away feeling for the reader, in a like manner of the

Through paradox and antonym Obrien establishes a love-hate relationship with war and the violence that plagues the emotional and mental health of the soldiers who experience it. “War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling. War is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.” This series of paradoxes highlights the complexities of war and invites the readers to question its true nature and effects on a soldier. The anaphora of the word ‘War’ emphasises the severity of its effects and the depth of its complexity as well as establishing a cause-and-effect relationship between the event – war and its outcomes – emotional and mental detrimental effects on soldiers. This is shocking to most readers as they question how such a brutal phenomenon such as war can have upsides. Obrien cleverly provokes thought to these readers by almost romanticising and vividly describing aspects of war, through colourful imagery, figurative language and the ‘you’ pronoun. “You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like