This chapter “The Ghost Soldiers”, showed us how Tim O’Brien and the other soldiers were dealing with the war both physically and psychologically. It also shows us how the Tim O'Brien behaved and felt when he was shot, wounded and had a bacteria infection on his butt and how the war changed the way he thought, and viewed the other soldiers around him. This chapter also contain a lot of psychological lens. From the way Tim O’Brien felt when he was shot and separated from his unit to a new unit to when he wanted revenge on Bobby Jorgenson for almost “killing” him.
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.
In the short story, “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien focuses on this to show that everyone fighting in a war has a story. He spends the story describing the man he killed and searching for justification of his actions. He carries around guilt with him because of it, and his fellow soldiers try to help him justify and come to terms with his action by saying things like, “You want to trade places with him? Turn it all upside down= you want that? I mean, be honest,” (126) and “Tim, it’s a war.
1.Guilt is one of the worst things accompanied by death. Guilt plays a huge role throughout the novel. In war, men are constantly dying and these men all become best friends with one another. For example, Norman Bowker felt a tremendous amount of quilt towards the death of Kiowa.
The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, illustrates the experiences of a man and his comrades throughout the war in Vietnam. Tim O’Brien actually served in the war, so he had a phenomenal background when it came to telling the true story about the war. In his novel, Tim O’Brien uses imagery to portray every necessary detail about the war and provide the reader with a true depiction of the war in Vietnam. O’Brien starts out the book by describing everything he and his comrades carry around with them during the war. Immediately once the book starts, so does his use of imagery.
The long duration of war takes a toll on soldiers and they are forced to tuck their emotions into a place far away, and not feel anything. If these emotions drove their actions, they would never accomplish anything at war. They turn into dehumanized machines in order to survive the horrors of war. Writing and telling stories of war allow for them to feel emotions again, “But this too is true: stories can save us” (O’Brien 225). Human beings need to release their emotions, and these
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.
Challenges at War Robert E. Lee once said, “What a cruel thing war is… to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors”. The novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien takes place in Vietnam. He and a handful of other men experience things only one can image and hope they will never have to experience again. They learn how death among them can greatly affect them, and many others. War is not an easy task to get through and these men all had different coping methods.
This quote epitomizes the trauma caused by war. O’Brien is trying to cope, mostly through writing these war stories but has yet to put it behind him. He feels guilt, grief, and responsibility, even making up possible scenarios about the life of the man he killed and the type of person he was. This
Tim O’Brien never lies. While we realise at the end of the book that Kiowa, Mitchell Sanders and Rat Kiley are all fictional characters, O’Brien is actually trying to tell us that there is a lot more truth hidden in these imagined characters than we think. This suggests that the experiences he went through were so traumatic, the only way to describe it was through the projection of fictional characters. O’Brien explores the relationship between war experiences and storytelling by blurring the lines between truth and fiction. While storytelling can change and shape a reader’s opinions and perspective, it might also be the closest in helping O’Brien cope with the complexity of war experiences, where the concepts like moral and immorality are being distorted.
Psychological Warfare in The Things They Carried Unless you have been in war or have read The Things They Carried, you can't fully understand the psychological toll on a person's mind and body, you can't understand the psychological hardship soldiers go through in war. However, The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien, is written to where it shows the overall psychological effects of war on soldiers in and out of Vietnam; as shown throughout the story, the recurring themes of trauma, love, and guilt give the clear psychological implications of war.
O’Brien’s story repeats the same thing of showing the men experiencing traumatic events and having them brush it off like nothing happened. In truth they are the opposite compared to their act. The tough outer shell they show protects their fragile insides, shielding them from the shame they have created themselves. The soldiers know about this unconsciously and they suppress it. Telling jokes about their situation or about others takes away some of the gloom from the tragedies that have befallen them.
War was so much more than just war to O’Brien and he able to share this through his writing. " But this is true: stories can save us. ... in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world." (page
The True Weight of War “The Things They Carried,” by Tim O’Brien, brings to light the psychological impact of what soldiers go through during times of war. We learn that the effects of traumatic events weigh heavier on the minds of men than all of the provisions and equipment they shouldered. Wartime truly tests the human body and and mind, to the point where some men return home completely destroyed. Some soldiers have been driven to the point of mentally altering reality in order to survive day to day. An indefinite number of men became numb to the deaths of their comrades, and yet secretly desired to die and bring a conclusion to their misery.
The soldiers in the Vietnams war were there for different reasons, some soldiers were forced against their will and some were there by choice. Because of that, each soldier has their own thoughts about the war, O’Brien has interpreted that “The twenty –six men were very quiet: some of them excited by the adventure, some of them afraid”. This clearly shows how the men
