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Theme Of Innocence In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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Fifty-eight thousand, one hundred forty-eight soldiers were killed in Vietnam. Over seventy-five thousand were disabled, and over five thousand lost limbs. Of those killed in Vietnam, eleven thousand four-hundred sixty-five were younger than twenty years of age. Five men killed in the war were only sixteen. Innocence was perhaps these young men’s greatest trait. Innocence is a theme that readers see throughout “The Things They Carried”, a book written by Tim O’Brien, a former Vietnam soldier. This theme is seen most prominently in “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” and “Lives of the Dead”.
Most soldiers who showed up in Vietnam were young men from the average ages of nineteen to twenty-six. The story of “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” …show more content…

A “…seventeen year old, fresh out of Cleveland Heights Senior High” girl called Mary Anne is the focal point of Rat’s story. Mary Anne was shipped from America to Vietnam by her “…grammar school sweetheart…”, and arrived an innocent and naïve young woman. Similar to Mary Anne is the character Linda, in the story “Lives of the Dead”. She is introduced as a young girl of only nine with “poise and great dignity”, and is Timmy’s fourth-grade sweetheart. Both Linda and Mary Anne are introduced as sweet-faced and gentle. Their fates, however, are extraordinarily different. Unfortunately, Linda dies at a very young age, due to a brain tumor. As a result of this early death, Linda remained innocent in the mind and eyes of Tim O’Brien. Little is known about what happened to Mary Anne, when or how she died. However, the friendly and bubbly teen was a curious individual, and as she became progressively more immerged in the land and culture of Vietnam, Mary Anne began to change. The change was not immediate. Slowly, Mary Anne began stop wearing cosmetics and she “stopped wearing jewelry, cut her hair short and wrapped it in a dark green bandana”. She started spending time with

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Things They Carried By Tim Obrien Sparknotes

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For Veterans, war has impacted a majority of their life due to the traumatic events that they encounter, so they are left them with the last decision, which it could be drugs or suicide. In the book, The Things They Carried, Tim Obrien writes several short stories on the Vietnam War. A fictional book based on real events and how he describes the Vietnam War as the most significant event in his life because of the things he and his friends had to face. It studies the nature of young men in a time of war, and what made them do tough decisions in and after the war. The thing that is noticeable at first is how characters go into development, and how they listed the things the men had carried with the profound irony being that is not the physical thing they carried but the nonphysical thing they carried, the emotion, the experience and the guilt they encounter in Vietnam.

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The Paradox Of War In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, the author skillfully presents a paradox about war and how it is both horrible and beautiful. Through O’Brien’s vivid storytelling and sorrowful anecdotes, he is able to demonstrate various instances which show both the horrible and beautiful nature of war. Within the vulnerability of the soldiers and the resilience found in the darkest of circumstances, O’brien is able to show the uproarious emotional landscape of war with a paradox that serves as the backbone of the narrative. In the first instance, O’Brien explores the beauty in horror within the chapter “Love.”

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'Sweetheart Of The Song Tra Bong'

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In The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, Tim uses a series of war stories to explain what it was like for him and his fellow soldiers in the Vietnam War. While many seem factually untrue, he describes a True war story as one that makes you feel the same emotions and feelings the soldiers had, opposed to true war stories that tell of what actually happened. He explains how the teller “wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt… facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around…” (O’Brien 89). The stories were made up based off how they felt experiencing it. One specific story, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” recounts the story of a soldier bringing over his girlfriend and the transformation she goes through as she spends time in the jungle.

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Mary Anne Bell Quotes

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The last scene with Mary Anne shows just how drastically transformed she becomes with blank stares and a necklace of human tongues (105). This is far from the pure, sweet Mary Anne that is described in the beginning of the novel, because this is someone who has seen and done unimaginable

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Things They Carried By Tim O Brien: A Literary Analysis

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Readers, especially those reading historical fiction, always crave to find believable stories and realistic characters. Tim O’Brien gives them this in “The Things They Carried.” Like war, people and their stories are often complex. This novel is a collection stories that include these complex characters and their in depth stories, both of which are essential when telling stories of the Vietnam War. Using techniques common to postmodern writers, literary techniques, and a collection of emotional truths, O’Brien helps readers understand a wide perspective from the war, which ultimately makes the fictional stories he tells more believable.

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In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the author retells the chilling, and oftentimes gruesome, experiences of the Vietnam war. He utilizes many anecdotes and other rhetorical devices in his stories to paint the image of what war is really like to people who have never experienced it. In the short stories “Spin,” “The Man I Killed,” and “ ,” O’Brien gives reader the perfect understanding of the Vietnam by placing them directly into the war itself. In “Spin,” O’Brien expresses the general theme of war being boring and unpredictable, as well as the soldiers being young and unpredictable.

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What Is The Theme Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’ Brien, the author conveys the theme that the burdens of war last a lifetime through the use of the literary element Characterization. The author conveys the theme primarily through the use of characterization. One example of this is on page 131 of the chapter entitled Ambush in which Tim O’Brien states, “When she was nine, my daughter Kathleen asked if I had killed anyone… It was a difficult moment but I did what I thought was right, which was to say, ‘Of course not,’ and then take her into my lap and hold her for a while.”

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Mary Anne Bell Character Analysis

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(O’Brien 109). Consequently, her appearance had altered dramatically since she arrived there. She would never have worn a necklace like that before she went to war. The war changed the way she thought. Mentally, war desensitized her.

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Innocence In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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As people mature and age, they learn from life and become more knowledgeable through experience. These experiences are not always wonderful and some do not have positive impacts on a human or on their psyche. Innocence is the opposite of having these experiences of pain and sadness in the world from which knowledge is gained. It is a purity that many people lose as they grow older.

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In November of 1955, the United States entered arguably one of the most horrific and violent wars in history. The Vietnam War is documented as having claimed about 58,000 American lives and more than 3 million Vietnamese lives. Soldiers and innocent civilians alike were brutally slain and tortured. The atrocities of such a war are near incomprehensible to those who didn’t experience it firsthand. For this reason, Tim O’Brien, Vietnam War veteran, tries to bring to light the true horrors of war in his fiction novel The Things They Carried.

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The Vietnam War was very different from the past wars. There were a lot more cases of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) among soldiers than any other wars http://historyofptsd.umwblogs.org/vietnam/ . In ‘The Things They Carried’, a book about the Vietnam War written by Tim O’Brien, using the psychological lense can help us understand how wars can change a person’s mental state dramatically. It can show us what soldiers had to carry during the war, including intangibles, like fear and guilt. These men had to fight a war that the U.S. did not have to be involved in and it changed their whole life.

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The Vietnam War leaves a legacy of moral confusion with each and every soldier who serves. Soldiers are fighting for a cause they do not necessarily believe in, killing people who do not necessarily deserve it, and watching their brothers die beside them. Tim O’Briens’ book, The Things They Carried, illustrates the soldiers struggle to define morality throughout the confusion of the war. On the Rainy River, Tim O’Brien faces what he feels is his moral obligation to answer his country’s call and fight in Vietnam, and a personal moral issue with the reason for the war.

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