Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

2. Tim O’Brien considers the difference between courageous and cowardice in the eyes of the people at home to be warped compared to how relatively close they are. These terms sum up soldiers into two groups when every single soldier experiences more than that in a war. In the story of Norman Bower returning home with his medals, he write from Norman’s perspective. One aspect of returning home that was conveyed by this story was doing actions that earned medals. Norman talks of how he almost got more medals and was had the courage to try and rescue Kiowa’s body but couldn’t do it while under artillery fire. This wasn’t a case of whether he could or couldn’t summon a supply of courage to support his country but just the pure reactions someone

O’Brien hits the reader with a dark reality of war stories, “There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.” This is something that O’Brien gets from talking to Rat Kiley’s experiences with writing to his beloved. The guy started out as innocent but comes back jaded and angry. This is a symptom of the truth, it’s not pretty and anyone telling you there is something to be gained from learning about them is wrong. One of the important truths of a war story is that it doesn’t leave out the dirty gritty details that really tell the experience. A reader may see this quote and feel strange that O’Brien chooses to point out that war stories aren’t for feeling uplifted, they probably chose this book to get a good story about some soldiers in Vietnam. Rather, O’Brien wants the reader to see that any war story worth telling is going to leave in the terrible parts that cause disgust and retching. War is not something to be used to feel that there is a greater

O’Brien takes a technique from other writers of changing the meaning of a description while describing it to change how the reader perceives the event or object. He also uses descriptions that that feel like the characters are actually saying them, using very real dialogue. “No moon and no stars. It was the purest black you could imagine, Sanders said, the kind of clock-stopping black that God must've had in mind when he sat down to invent blackness.” This is the kind of thing you can really use to help you image how the soldiers felt about something and how they would actually describe it. O’Brien goes further with this description of blackness, “It made your eyeballs ache. You'd shake your head and blink, except you couldn't even tell you were blinking, the blackness didn't change. So pretty soon you'd get jumpy. Your nerves would go.” This mirrors the thoughts of someone actually experiencing these things. Their thoughts would be racing and they would feel deprived and uncomfortable. O’Brien’s description writing really works to let the reader get a sense of the thoughts and words of a soldier experiencing something like marching in enemy territory for hours in a pitch black