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The Vietnam War In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

1567 Words7 Pages

The Vietnam War was a war of divisiveness, antagonism, and death. In the novel “The Things They Carried“, writer Tim O’Brien reflects on those aspects of war and takes the reader on a multifaceted journey. Throughout the novel, the author emphasizes the desensitization necessitated by the brutality of battle as well as the shame and guilt that the soldiers carried with them. O’Brien juxtaposes the burden of a soldier’s obligation alongside recurrent glimpses of youth and innocence. The weight of war upon humanity is a theme O’Brien develops through powerful symbolism of contradictory characters who resemble the loss of innocence and parallels with the soldiers fighting in Vietnam. At the beginning of the novel, names of soldiers and the …show more content…

The actions, duty, and personal involvement of war brought him shame. He was forced to kill when he never wanted to kill, he didn’t even want to be there. “I did not hate the young man; I did not see him as the enemy; I did not ponder issues of mortality or politics or military duty…None of it mattered. The war seemed far too complicated. All I could do was gape at the fact of the young man's body”(128). He couldn’t even contemplate what he had done and he didn’t want to. He had no feelings or hatred for this man, he was mentally numb because this is never what he had imagined for himself. As O’Brien was trying to mourn the loss of this unknown man, the insensitivity of his fellow peers overwhelmed him. “‘Oh man you fuckin’ trashed that fucker’ Azar said. ‘You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like shredded fuckin’ wheat…I’m just sayin’ the truth. Like oatmeal’”(119). The text reiterates the message that with murder and killing came pride with some soldiers. This encouraged soldiers to adopt the mindset behind it was to do the most damage and cause the most hurt, remorse, and sorrow. Soldiers are required to end someone's life without even knowing who they were. The author O’Brien purposefully uses metafiction to create a perplexing and complex blending of what is fiction and what is reality. ADD Readers empathize for this character O’Brien, they feel for the man that he killed, they resent Azar for saying those inconsiderate remarks, but also get caught off guard believing this story. The reader is never able to know what parts are true and what parts author Tim O’Brien is creating to get his point across which is both genius and complicated. Tim O’Brien created these desensitized characters

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War is one of the most complex yet completely understood subjects to read or write about. Tim O’Brien has captured the true essence of being drafted into a war. “The Things They Carried” is a novel composed of multiple short stories; Each taking the reader through the perspective of the narrator showing his multiple landscapes, situations, and changing feelings from being drafted into the Vietnam War to surviving it. These stories really help one understand the effects of war on someone’s mind as well as body. Tim O’Brien is the main character and protagonist in this novel.

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In “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brian, the author discusses distinct items the soldiers carry with them during the Vietnam war. He explores weapons and equipment, but also talks about emotions and feelings the men frequently are approached by. The title of the novel is used to highlight the heavy emotional burden the soldiers had to carry during and after the war. In many cases, a soldier felt responsible for the death of one of his closest comrades.

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Most people don’t know much about what exactly happened in the Vietnam War. Should this war have even happened? Many Americans believe this war was unnecessary for the armed forces to participate in, especially because of the damage caused in WWII. Tim O'Brien's novel, The Things They carry, offers a collection of short stories in which each expresses the different Vietnam experiences. Every story in this novel was impressive for its own unique reason.

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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.

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It is hard to find flowers scary so comparing them to death allows one to feel less bothered by it. In addition, the line “He wore a gold ring on his third finger.” adds an important detail because it shows that O’Brien remembers every small detail about the man that he killed. For O’Brien, he feels that if he can remember every little detail, he is able to justify his actions and make himself feel better. Remembering every detail about the man allows O’Brien to keep his spirit alive by telling stories of him, making the death seem less haunting. Finally, admirable diction is included in the explanation of the personality of the man he killed.

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Death was inevitable in war, and in this war, nearly 2 million people died. In the chapter “The Lives of the Dead” it talks about how Dave Jensen was using his dark humor and poking fun at a dead old man whose arm was blown off. Kiowa, instead wouldn’t join in on the joke because of his strong faith and his morals towards respecting elders. O’Brien also reflects back on when he first experienced the mourning of death. O’Brien’s way of mourning now is the complete opposite of how he did in the past, due to the

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Tim O’Brien is a novelist and a retired soldier from the Vietnam War. He wrote a semi-autobiographical novel titled, The Things They Carried, in a format that seemed as if we were in the novel itself. As readers continue with this novel one can envision and have the impression of deaths and all the effects war has on a soldier from the war. O’Brien explores the effect of war on an individual through fictionalized stories he tells in this novel in order to show how humans can change through drastic events that happen to them due to the war. Being in a war affects the way we think and the people we love.

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War, in whatever form it may be, significantly affects an individual’s life and postwar identity. The experiences one must endure place a tattoo, an imprint on one’s past and future. This permanent marker of the atrocities of war and of the psychological effects of violence remains with a soldier throughout his or her life. In the novel, The Things They Carried, narrator and protagonist, Tim O’ Brien, uses his gift of pen to illustrate his personal experience in the Vietnam War. His collection of stories, blurred by lines of fact and fiction, highlights the importance of the act of storytelling rather than the objective truth of a war story.

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He tells the audience on the title page the this book is a work of fiction. O’Brien states in “Good Form” that not all facts throughout the book are told true. In “The Man I Killed” he mentions a killing a man near My Nye, describing the pain and injuries he gave the man. He believes that if he was not the one to kill the man, he would’ve been killed by the hands of someone else anyway. Later, he states that this even is untrue.

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O’Brien then adds, “the way your eyes focus on a tiny white pebble or a blade of grass and how you start thinking, Oh man, that’s the last thing I’ll ever see, that pebble, that blade of grass, which makes you want to cry” (182). This statement encompasses the ultimate reality of facing death on the battlefield. People might even ask themselves what sort of heroic death they are departing with, and whether they are truly proud of their sacrifice in that moment of departure. The truth is, soldiers are not thinking about their country when they’re being shot at, they’re thinking about everybody they know, especially themselves and their fellow infantry mates fighting viciously beside them; and that is the main idea that O’Brien cleverly articulates as the tone of all the firefights they encounter in the

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764 Words | 4 Pages

In the "Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien, Tim O'Brien, Norman Bowker, and the young boy whose name was never revealed are all examples of soldiers who couldn't or at least had a hard time talking about their expiriences in war. In the NPR interview with Tim O'Brien one caller who happened to be a Vietnam soldier said he “couldn’t tell anybody what [he] had witnessed”. Many of the soliders who served in Vietnam had a hard time talking about their experiences of the war. The soldiers felt as if nobody cared about how they felt because they were supposed to be strong-minded individuals. If they had someone to talk to often times bringing up memories of the horrifying scenes of the war made their situation worse.

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Being that she is too young, O’Brien feels the need to preserve the innocence of his daughter from the abominations of the war. He lies to her and tells her that he has never killed anyone before, and then he writes this story to deal with his guilt. He says, “Someday, I hope, she’ll ask again. But here I want to pretend she’s a grown-up.”

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Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a collection of essays, all centered on anecdotes of American soldiers during the Vietnam War. The seemingly straightforward recollections slowly reveal dense layers of personal and metaphorical meanings upon closer inspection, with the exploration of the characters’ emotions and the underlying motif of love creating the opportunity to trace how war changes a person in the realm of his emotions. The Vietnam warfare acts as a catalyst for all of the unsettling changes in the soldiers’ minds, raising the question whether the battlefield is actively responsible for this result or merely accelerating the inevitable manifestation of these personal issues, inherent in every person. In the collection of essays

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