Vietnam War In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

The Things They Carried is a novel, about a true-war story, written by Tim O’Brien. This novel is a combination of various stories in one plot that mainly focuses on the Vietnam War. The novel was written almost twenty years later by one of the surviving soldiers, Tim. The narrator expresses what a significant impact the Vietnam War had created on the soldiers, both mentally and physically. O’Brien was always opposed to the war; he was never involved in any violence and wished to never be involved in any. The fact that Tim was a Harvard graduate and a very honorable man, caused him to believe it was impossible to become a soldier in a glance. Tim believed that his life was too perfect to be ruined by a war, which nobody knew what the exact

O’Brien used this to express the burden each solider had to carry on his back from one station to another. Having this repetition at the very front created curiosity to attract the reader in and also clarify the characteristic based on the thing they carried. O’Brien also lists these items weight to emphasize the physical burdens soldiers had to carry. Using a repetitive list of tangible items carried allows O'Brien to then put emphasis on the weight of the intangible - the psychological impact of war - that also troubled the soldier’s hearts and minds. Each soldier carried their personal values which shows, each soldier is a unique, individual person. The narrator says: "Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books."(3). By letting the reader get to know each soldier better as a unique person, O'Brien encourages readers to better sympathize with and get to know each soldier. “They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity” (15).Repetition was not only used in the diction, but also in the sentence structure. While reading, you could sense the trouble these soldiers were facing because of the syntactical structure. At one point, the author used an entire page with simple and short sentence to

The fact that he used to work in a pig slaughter, meatpacking factory, where he would clean out the blood clots from the pig. That was the second symbolism which was also used as a foreshadowing. In addition, the material items the men carried is more than just equipment; they are symbols that represent various facets of each soldier’s personality. For example, “Rat Kiley carried...morphine and plasma and malaria tablets and surgical tape...and all the things a medic must carry, including M&M’s for especially bad wounds” (5). Because Kiley carried most of the medical supplies demonstrate that he is a good paramedic who is devoted to doing his job well. Yet, the M&M’s signifies something different- Kiley’s cheerful and hopeful point of view on the war and life in general. On the contrary, the tranquilizers carried by Ted Lavender represented his fear of the combating in the war and his failure to face reality. Instead, Lavender chooses to escape from his terror it by taking drugs and other damaging