Things They Carried By Tim O Brien: Literary Analysis

Love, regret, fear, and courage are all intertwined into Tim O’Brien's book, The Things They Carried. O'Brien uses his own experiences with the Vietnam war as well as stories told from his companions to create a book to show how the war affects people differently. By using his own story, he is able to have an honest outlook into the war that tells about the things that happened off of the footage that the nation could watch. The individual stories of the men are shown throughout this book to allow for a full circle story that captures most all aspects of the war, in essence, what happened other than the fighting. Instead of discussing the book as a whole, I am focusing on the main themes that are shown throughout the book. Themes such as fable or fiction and the motivations behind each of the men going to go fight. The men are not only fighting a physical war, they also have

By giving the main character of the book his own name, O'Brien makes a clear connection to all of the stories told in the book by explaining them through emotion and vivid detail, though he is caught contradicting himself multiple times throughout the book. O'Brien didn't want to write a war story, as told in an interview, so he decides to use stories in order to outline the war without making the book more of a collection of stories rather than a war book. By doing this, the stories are subjected to fictionalization, nevertheless, the reader is prone to believe that the author is telling the full truth because, there are no obvious reasons would O'Brien have to lie. Though he may be pushing the stories further than they may have actually went, they are able to connect together and form a book that can be read by anyone who is not a fan of war books, while still being enjoyable for people that do enjoy war books. The war to this book is more of an element rather than a main