The Things They Carried Psychological Analysis Essay

Delayna Ordonez
May 26th, 2016
English 102, Section 0305
Research Paper
Word Count:

Burn Your Draft Card: A New Psychological Analysis of “The Things They Carried”
Human beings find value in uncountable objects that surround their lives every day and throughout the years they journey through life. Many times a person can find value through the memories a physical object holds for them, but the important moral? Value? in every situation is to reflect on the problems overcome and trials completed throughout life. “The absence of anything solid and real to cling to is a recurring theme” in Tim O'Brien's “The Things They Carried.” “[The soldier’s] sessions are consistently shown as serving, if not to ease group anxieties, at least to share and claim ownership of them. This interpretation supports the

Different truths about people surfaced during the war, some weaknesses were exposed and new strengths were discovered through the battle. As a group the soldiers shared similarities and differences in the folk therapy they faced each hardship with depending on where they came from and what they valued in their lives. In Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” Kiowa is a Native American who is also a devout Baptist, despite being the only Native American in his platoon he is treated as an equal as the soldiers are constantly on the move on the battlefield. It is revealed that “as a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother's distrust of the white man, his grandfather's old hunting hatchet. Necessity dictated” (O’Brien 12). For a Native American man during the war, the distrust of the white man who mistreated his people for so long is a reality he uses as a source of strength in the midst of constant danger. The character Henry Dobbins had a