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The Things They Carried Swot Cross Character Analysis

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Tim O’Brien’s novel, “The Things They Carried,” is a short story that talks about a group of soldier’s experiences during the Vietnam War. O’Brien tells the reader about the different objects the soldiers each carried in order to show emotional appeal of the object. Throughout the whole story, the protagonist, Lieutenant Cross, is a soldier who fails to keep his mind focus away from his real life back at home. The author tells us that all he ever focused on was his college sweet heart named Martha. Cross usually separated himself from his men to fantasize about his beloved Martha. The main conflict of this essay is that Lieutenant Cross is unable to control his obsessive behavior over Martha, and therefore, leads to him being an awful leader. One way you can identify that Lieutenant Cross is an awful leader is because he never took war seriously and let his men do whatever they wanted. Since Lt. Cross was always distracted, his men seemed to be fooling around most of the time. At night, it was all fun and games for this group of soldiers. The soldiers became very careless; therefore, they began doing drugs and even started letting go of their equipment. Lt. Cross on the other hand would sit by himself reading over the letters that Martha would send him. The author mentions, “Slowly, and a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, …show more content…

Cross is an awful leader because he is to in love with Martha, which makes him unable to do his duties properly. The emotional burden he feels after the death of his good friend Lavender makes him drop of out of the military and return home. The theme of the story revolves around shame and guilt. Towards the end of the essay, Lt. Cross burns all of Martha’s letters in order to make it seem like he will forgot about Martha. Unfortunately, it is to late to correct the decisions he should have made a long time ago. His obsessive nature over Martha leads to the overall them of the story, guilt and

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Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, of the Alpha Company, carries various reminders of his love for Martha, a girl from his college in New Jersey who has given no indication of returning his love. Cross carries her letters in his backpack and her good-luck pebble in his mouth. After a long day’s march, he unwraps her letters and imagines the prospect of her returning his love someday. Martha is an English major who writes letters that quote lines of poetry and never mention the war. Though the letters are signed “Love, Martha” Cross understands that this gesture should not give him false hope.

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Along with his usual gear, though, he carries with him the burden of not being able to be with his girlfriend and , “walking barefoot along the Jersey Shore, with Martha, carrying nothing,” (O’Brien 1480). Therefore in order to forget this burden Cross carries a pebble in his mouth because it is one Martha picked up, and he also stares at pictures of her in his foxhole every night. This is what keeps Cross, in a sense, sane during the war because he can escape the horrors around him and at the same time witness something beautiful and peaceful in a place that would be considered ugly and horrendous. Cross’s escape from the war can be contrasted to the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” in the sense that the speaker in this poem cannot escape the war he is in, but rather he has to face it every day without a break in the war since the troops have to march on until the soldier’s, “distant rest began to trudge,” (N).

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