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Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

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Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a short story that would later be the first in a collection of short stories by the same name. It creatively retells the author’s experiences as a foot soldier in the Vietnam War. These stories are an uncensored look into the thoughts and experiences of a soldier in active combat and offer a perspective on war that the average person will never experience. While some critics believe that these stories perpetuate anti-feminist ideas and promote a hyper-masculine idea of war, I would disagree. I believe that O’Brien’s faithful retelling does the opposite, and rather than perpetuate these ideas, offers a perspective that shows readers how these ideas have become baked into the idea of war. The titular story …show more content…

The story describes in detail the physical equipment each soldier carries, as well as the emotional baggage related to each item. One day, while soldier Ted Lavender is taking a bathroom break, he is shot and killed. Cross proceeds to blame himself for Lavender’s death as he was preoccupied with thoughts of Martha at the moment he was shot. The morning after, Cross digs a foxhole to put Martha’s letters and photos in and burns them. He believes he must let go of these desires to be as great a leader as possible for his troops. He accepts the blame for Lavender’s death and vows to be an exceptional leader to his platoon from there on out. One critic, Lorrie Smith, writes about this story and a couple of other stories from the book in an article titled Back Against the Wall: Anti-Feminist Backlash in Vietnam War Literature. I found this article through another essay, Tim O'Brien and Gender: A Defense of The Things They Carried by Susan Farrel. Lorrie Smith argues that the stories told within the book The Things They Carried continue to promote the retelling of Vietnam War stories as a hyper-masculine experience while silencing female voices and perpetuating sexist

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Shame and self-hatred surface when Lieutenant Cross realizes “…Ted Lavender [is] dead because he [loves] her [Martha] so much and [cannot] stop thinking about her” (326). Furthermore, the pebble that once symbolized his affection for Martha is replaced with a figurative “stone in his stomach” (332), representative of his guilt. In order to begin to remove his distracting infatuation with Martha, Cross takes the following action: “On the morning after Ted Lavender [dies], First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross [crouches] at the bottom of his foxhole and [burns] Martha’s letters. Then he [burns] the two photographs” (336). Cross’ burning of Martha’s letters and photographs is a physical representation of the transformation in his personality and priorities.

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War is one of the most complex yet completely understood subjects to read or write about. Tim O’Brien has captured the true essence of being drafted into a war. “The Things They Carried” is a novel composed of multiple short stories; Each taking the reader through the perspective of the narrator showing his multiple landscapes, situations, and changing feelings from being drafted into the Vietnam War to surviving it. These stories really help one understand the effects of war on someone’s mind as well as body. Tim O’Brien is the main character and protagonist in this novel.

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Summary Of The Thing They Carry By Tim O Brien

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In the novel The Thing They Carry the book it depicts the many issues a person faces going to the war and problems they face during the war. At the beginning of the book we are introduced to Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and a girl named Martha back home whom writes to him. These letters and one-sided love blinded the Lieutenant which resulted in the death of one of his men. He had the responsibility of keeping his men safe and making sure they were gonna get out of the war alive. However, his feeling towards Martha got the best of him which got Ted Lavender killed.

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The Things They Carried is a fascinating and illuminating novel written by Tim O'Brien. Published in 1990, it is a collection of interconnected short stories that depicts the experiences of American soldiers during the Vietnam War. In his novel The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien employs Juxtaposition to create the effect of long-term effects of trauma and an abrupt, violent loss of innocence. The chapters “The Man I Killed”, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, and “How to Tell a True War Story” work together to produce this effect.

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Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

1085 Words | 5 Pages

The Vietnam War was full of grief, heartache and tragedy, no one experienced this more than the soldiers who fought in it. Tim O’Brien shows the trauma the war has caused him in his book The Things They Carried. The story focuses on the character Tim, a member of Alpha Company, who tells his stories of the war. Many of these stories circle around guilt, and each character in the book has a different way of coping with it. One character, Kiowa, acts as the glue that holds Alpha Company together.

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888 Words | 4 Pages

After a long day of marching, “He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there” (1). The author uses abstract diction to emphasize the strong love Cross maintains for Martha, signifying the huge role Martha plays in Cross’s experience in war. Not long after, Cross’s dreams becomes more exotic. Hoping that Martha is still a virgin, he recalls a story of when he got rejected, It was at "a dark theater, he remembered, and the movie was Bonnie and Clyde, and Martha wore a tweed skirt, and during the final scene, when he touched her knee, she turned and looked at him in a sad, sober way that made him pull his hand back”.

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In Vietnam from 1960 to 1970, as death surrounded the land and homes, someone birthed a story. Tim O'Brien authored “The Things They Carried,” a shivering and heartbreaking story. Through his writing, O’Brien portrays strength, courage, loss, and love in such a dark place and time. Before, during, and after the Vietnam War, as characters grapple with their emotional traumas, O’Brien illustrates their various coping mechanisms and how they use them to survive their experiences during and post-war. O’Brien depicts the mental damage war inflicts on multiple characters.

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Things They Carried Rhetorical Analysis Essay

1333 Words | 6 Pages

In war, there is a winning side and a losing side, but both suffer casualties. Afflictions are not always dealt in death and physical pain, but also emotional damage. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, he emphasizes war’s capabilities to change people. When Mary Anne, a sweet, innocent, all-American girl, arrives in Vietnam to be with her soldier boyfriend, change is inevitable, and she will eventually lose her naiveté. O’Brien utilizes personification, jarring imagery, hyperbole, and pathos to convey that war shatters all innocence, no matter how hard one may try to avoid the change.

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Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

568 Words | 3 Pages

O’Brien states, “Lavender is dead. You couldn’t burn the blame” (22). Lieutenant Cross was so infatuated with his “girlfriend” Martha that he was not able to be a good leader. His inability to lead well caused the death of one of his soldiers, Ted

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1091 Words | 5 Pages

The narrative switches between Jimmy Cross thinking about Martha and him describing what the soldiers were carrying. These two narratives did not really coincide other than he carried letters with him from Martha along with his war gear. There are small instances of dark humor, another post-modernism trait, in “The Things They Carried” as well. I thought that it was humorous that one of the soldiers checked the dead boys pulse although you could clearly see he was dead on page 1144. Another instance of dark humor is when they soldiers are waiting for Ted’s body to be picked up after his death.

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159 Words | 1 Pages

In The Things They Carried, O'Brien explores how shame can be shown in different ways for soldiers, including shame over their own actions, shame over their weaknesses, and shame over their inability to connect with or help others. One of the most notable examples of shame in the novel is the character of Jimmy Cross, who feels intense shame and guilt over the death of one of his men, Ted Lavender. Cross blames himself for Lavender's death, feeling that he was too distracted by his own thoughts of Martha to properly lead his army. This shame continues to trouble Cross long after the incident, even after he has left Vietnam.

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843 Words | 4 Pages

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