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Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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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 …show more content…

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 …show more content…

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

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Tim O’Brien and Brian Turner are both war veterans, who published books based on their war experience. Both of their books expresses their feelings and both have a unique way of telling war stories. However, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried book captures the reality of war better than Brian Turner’s Here Bullet book. Tim O’Brien is very descriptive with his story, He is very direct and very good at telling a war story to make it more interesting.

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Although the soldier he killed was an enemy soldier, instead of vilifying him he was able to humanize the man. O’Brien was able to describe the physical appearance of the soldier and imagine her life before war. The author was able to portray an emotional connection and made the line between friend and enemy almost vanish. This was able to reveal the natural beauty of shared humanity even in the context of war’s horror. O’Brien is able to find the beauty in the midst of this tragic and horrible event.

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Tim O’Brien, born in Austin, Minnesota, grew up with a common childhood. At 7 years old, he and his family moved to Worthington, Minnesota. Once O’Brien graduated high school, he attended Macalester College. There, he got drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, though he opposed it. The time O’Brien spent in Vietnam had a major impact on his life.

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Obrien perfectly describes the duality of war saying, “war is nasty; war is fun” and “war makes you a man; war makes you dead” (76). War has many positives for some men, and it gives them a chance to honor their country. War is also horrible and leads to the death of countless young men with bright futures ahead. O’Brien uses the story of the water buffalo to describe all the emotions described in the description of war. The shooting of the water buffalo shows how desensitized soldiers become due to the mindless killing of Vietnam.

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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 the chapter Speaking of Courage, the narrator explains how Norman tries to save Kiowa, “He would've talked about this, and how he grabbed Kiowa by the boot and tried to pull him out. He pulled hard but Kiowa was gone, and then suddenly he felt himself going, too.” (page 143). Norman lived with this for the rest of his life, playing what he could've done to save him over and over again in his head. Another example is in the chapter,

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In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien expresses to the reader why the men went to the war and continued to fight it. In the first chapter, “The Things They Carried,” O’Brien states “It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather they were too frightened to be cowards.” The soldiers went to war not because they were courageous and ready to fight, but because they felt the need to go. They were afraid and coped with their lack of courage by telling stories (to themselves or aloud) and applied humor to the situations they encountered.

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In Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” the character, O’Brien, is shot during combat. The medic on duty, being a rooky, is unsure of how to help O’Brien. He is later hospitalized and unable to fight anymore. When he finally returns to combat duty, he feels out of place and no longer at home with the other soldiers. He becomes obsessed with exacting his revenge on the medic.

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This forewarns the reader that they could be reading something that is real or something that is completely made up. O’Brien is a masterful writer who has created an unique story about the experience of war through his style of writing.

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How can one tell if something is true or not? How can one tell if what you hear or read is pure fiction or reality? These are questions I often asked myself when I read “The Things they Carried” by Tim O’Brien. You begin to ask these questions throughout the book but begin to realize that these type of questions don't matter. What matters is the deeper meaning that the author is trying to convey.

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The soldiers in the Vietnam War are portrayed as losing themselves in the chaos and trauma of combat. Through the stories of the soldiers and their experiences, O’Brien explores the ways in which war strips away one's sense of identity and humanity. The author himself is depicted as losing himself in the war. O'Brien served in the Vietnam War, and his experiences inspired much of the book. Through the character of Tim O'Brien, the author explores the ways in which war can strip away one's sense of self and purpose.

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886 Words | 4 Pages

O’Brien goes into great depth in this small quote on how loss of innocence and war can affect people in the war. The quote “Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t” shows how war is so different from what any human experiences at home. After that small quote he follows it up by bringing up how you have to use normal stuff to show how crazy these things are and how much of a pole it can have on somebody during a war. The way that war is treated for many is mostly the mental part that is struggling. But for many "War is hell, but that's not half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love.

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O’Brien also shows the reality that they were just young boys who were scared, and forced by shame and their social obligations to fight the war, which contrasts from a “traditional” soldier who is seen as a brave hero. From time to time, throughout the whole book, someone would say that he is just a young boy; this is almost their way of indirectly saying that: they are scared and not as brave as they try to be, and that, they were just boys who had dreamt of living a normal life. Also, right from the beginning of the book, in the chapter “The Things They Carried”, O’Brien illustrates how they try to act with poise and dignity but fails when there were times of panic. He says that “they were afraid of dying but they were more afraid of showing

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One event that seems to haunt him constantly is the death of his friend Kiowa. Years after the war, Norman continues to struggle with the images and atrocities of war. He even reaches out to O'Brien in a letter exclaiming, “the thing is,’ he wrote, ‘there’s no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general.

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688 Words | 3 Pages

He fought a war in Vietnam that he knew nothing about, all he knew was that, “Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons” (38). He realized that he put his life on the line for a war that is surrounded in controversy and questions. Through reading The Things They Carried, it was easy to feel connected to the characters; to feel their sorrow, confusion, and pain. O’Briens ability to make his readers feel as though they are actually there in the war zones with him is a unique ability that not every author possess.

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