Tim O Brien Figurative Language

Novelist, Tim O’Brien writes short semi true stories about his and other’s experiences in the Vietnam war. O’Brien wanted to explain to his audience what happens in war and how it effects people after the fact. O’Brien really helps his audience acknowledge how much war really does change people. Tim’s dynamic use of symbolism, imagery, and figurative language emphasizes the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that people experience during and after the war.
O’Brien begins by analyzing the thoughts of sorrow and loss overwhelm the Vietnam veterans upon their return back home. “The war was over and there was no place in particular to go.” (O’Brien 157). Crushed from the horror of war, they come back to even bigger disappointments and emptiness. Instead

During this chapter Tim talks about how Rat was the medic so he had really seen it worse than all the other soldiers. “Sometimes he’d stare at guys who were still okay, the alive guys, and he’d start to picture how they’d look dead. Without arms or legs --- that sort of thing.” (O’Brien 211). When people have PTSD sometimes they can experience “reliving the event or re-experiencing the event” (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs). Rat Kiley was becoming almost numb to seeing men with no legs or arms or dead bodies. In this case he was experiencing PTSD during the war instead of after. So, to get away from it all he drugged up and shot himself in the foot to be shipped off to

“People with PTSD may also face other problems. Such as: Depression or anxiety, Employment problems, and Relationship problems” (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs). Norman was experiencing all of these things “None of these jobs, he said, had lasted more than ten weeks. He lived with his parents, who supported him.” (O’Brien 149). He was obviously suffering from PTSD but everyone most likely assumed he would go back to being himself after a while. In his note he wrote “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.” (O’Brien 150). Norman basically feels like he’s trapped and stuck in war and Tim wrote “Its tone jumping from self-pity to anger to irony to guilt to a kind of feigned indifference” (O’Brien 150). These things many people with depression and PTSD feel and he feels like part of him was already