Theme Of Insanity In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

Madness lies deep in everybody's subconscious; it's like an animal stalking it's pray waiting for the right moment and strikes when it is least expected. Insanity isn't something you will notice instantly, it grows and flourishes slowly and for a lot of people it will haunt them for the rest of their life. Many soldiers and veterans are tormented and will have to simply live with their now disturbed and demented psyche. In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried he portrays the soldiers of all having their different quarrels with insanity because, it is a way that they comprehend what they have done in the battlefield. The characters that best display madness are Jimmy Cross, Mitchell Sanders, and then Norman Bowker.

Jimmy cross is the First

does Jimmy Cross feels the intensity of madness but also Mitchell Sanders. He tells Tim this story about the density and weight that absolute silence can do to a mans mental health. He tells this tale of soldiers going insane because of the absolute silence around them because they were trying to listen for something. “Invisible. So what happens is, these guys get themselves deep in the bush, all camouflaged up, and they lie down and wait and that's all they do, nothing else, they lie there for seven straight days and just listen. And man, I'll tell you—it's spooky. This is mountains. You don't know spooky till you been there. Jungle, sort of, except it's way up in the clouds and there's always this fog—like rain, except it's not raining—everything's all wet and swirly and tangled up and you can't see jack, you can't find your own pecker to piss with. Like you don't even have a body. Serious spooky. You just go with the vapors—the fog sort of takes you in ... And the sounds, man. The sounds carry forever. You hear stuff nobody should overhear" (Tim O'Brien 63.) Even though this story isn't directly about Mitchell Sanders it still follows the motif of insanity. The details he tells keep getting more and more horrific as the plot leads on and he starts recalling what the soldiers start to hear. “Not human voices, though. Because it's the mountains. Follow me? The rock—it's talking. And the fog, too, and the grass and the goddamn mongooses. Everything talks. The

Sadly, PTSD is common with veterans from traumatic wars like this and Tim O'Brien address this occurrence in the book. In the chapter "Speaking of Courage" Norman Bowker returns to Iowa on the Fourth of July. He thinks about the unfulfilled dreams that could of happened between him and his high school sweetheart Sally and reminisces about his dead friend, Max Arnold, wishing to have another conversation with him and it seems that he is stuck in the past. He now only finds comfort in driving his fathers Chevy around his old neighborhood,this makes him feel safe and gives him comfort. He talks about how his father only cared about what Medals he got and how he could of gotten a silver star. He has no motivation for life and in the very next chapter it talks about his suicide letter. “The thing is," he wrote, "there's no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean. It's almost like I got killed over in Nam . . . Hard to describe. That night when Kiowa got wasted, I sort of sank down into the sewage with him . . . Feels like I'm still in deep shit."(Tim O'Brien 91.) Kiowas death still haunts him causing him PTSD and a lot of distress and he's also saying how he never really felt like himself after