Vignettes In The Things They Carried

The book The Things They Carried is a fictional novel/narrative written by Tim O’Brien and it was first published in the year 1990 by Houghton Mifflin. The novel consists of 23 chapters, or vignettes, where they revolve around the main protagonist, narrator, and author Tim O’Brien and his military pack which includes Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Henry Dobbins, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, Mitchell Sanders, Kiowa, Curt Lemon Ted Lavender, Lee Strunk, Dave Jensen, Azar, etc. The book takes place during the Cold War/the Vietnam War (1955-1975) in Vietnam, (as well as in Minnesota and Iowa) a proxy-war where the Communist forces battled the Anti-Communist forces in hopes of spreading Communism to them. The vignettes that Tim provides are multiple accounts that occurred during the time he served as a

Plus, the issues that the book mainly digresses and discusses into, are the moral question of whether war is right or not and the psychological effects it has on its soldiers or those involved in it as mentioned by O’Brien himself in some of the chapters and the main conflict O’Brien has during the war is having difficulty dealing with the war itself either by the long-term effects or by the immediate effects of the war. O’Brien sees the effects that it had on his comrades of the war through his narration and talks about it himself about what he is doing really is helping or not and what he personally thinks of the war and the ordeal. The chapters in the novel are stories that O’Brien recalls from the time he spent during the Vietnam War that revolves around himself and the troops he was with and some key details to summarize this novel despite there ever being a plot, are that during the summer of the year 1968, O’Brien has an internal crisis with himself and has trouble choosing whether he wants to join and fight in the