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The Things They Carried By Tim Obrien: An Analysis

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After the Vietnam War, a great many veterans experienced Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). For more than fifty years PTSD already alluded to as "Shell Shock" has been an enormous issue for Vietnam veterans. The National Veterans Readjustment study directed in 1988 found that 31% of men and 27% of women experienced PTSD upon their arrival home from the Vietnam War. Critical to acknowledge, it was not until 1989 the Veterans Administrations (VA) recorded PTSD as one of the leading conditions treated by their medical professionals. Subsequent to returning home from the war, Tim O'Brien creator of the novel The Things They Carried, was diagnosed as having PTSD. In the perspective of this, it took men and women years to rescue their lives due to some extent to the trauma endured and observed in Vietnam, which unendingly changed their lives. A significant portion of the soldiers who fought and served in Vietnam did not know the determining factors for being in Vietnam. The Things They Carried imparts …show more content…

Tim Obrien shows this because he continually allows the reader to form their personal opinions about the story. We are most often products of our thoughts and memories, in this reading the author intentionally manipulates the reader into not becoming opinionated about the Vietnam war but more focused to storytelling. Examples of this are throughout the story where the author provides you with information that he wants you to believe regarding a situation or soldier, and the reader has no other recourse but to accept it as valid as there is no reason to doubt it. If the quote gets an emotional response from the reader, the reader believes it as real. Novelist use this method which is called “Free Indirect Discourse” to reveal to the reader the thought, emotions, and feelings of the

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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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From this quote we can see that Tim Obrien knew that Kathleen was very far from the whole idea of war. He knew that her inocennce wont idea of war. He knew that her inoccents would not let her feel what he feeled about Vietnam but he tryed to by showing the world, offering a small piece of her fathers history. However Kathleen only seen the place as a randon only sees the place as a random field in Vietnam, she also did't like it " This whole war, she said ,why was everybody so mad at everybody else?"

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Combat is one of those incidents, where the best and the worst of people will be shown. The effects from combat could last minutes to a lifetime and will define people for the rest of their lives. To overcome the effects, people must have coping mechanisms. In the book, The Things They Carried, a platoon of soldiers is followed in their quest to survive the Vietnam War. The soldiers developed coping mechanisms to deal with stress so they can function normally and survive the war.

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-Introduction- The novel, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, is a narrative composed in a non-linear structure which consists of short stories all drawn from O’Brien's experiences during the war. Each of these short stories are linked together to portray the emotional aspects and burdens young men suffered during this time. For context, The Vietnam War was a conflict between South Vietnam and North Vietnam, with the U.S. as the South's ally. It resulted in over 300,000 American injuries and 58,000 deaths, with the average age of soldiers being only 19. This left many vulnerable to psychological and emotional difficulties at an early age.

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