War In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

The Effects of War: The Things They Carried

When people are asked to describe the “why” behind something, they tend to come up with a handful of answers. This is normal, and many things do in fact have multiple factors behind them. However, when asked for a single reason, many tend to merely choose whichever of the previous answers they think fits the best. What should actually be done when approached with this sort of question is an analysis of what connects all of the different possible answers. If the core meaning -- the one, major thing that connects all other secondary answers -- is found, then that is the true answer to this question. Instead of listing the possible answers in order from least to greatest, find the common theme.

If the

However, he represents those who survived Vietnam. They did not escape unscathed. They loved, lost, and aged a hundred years in one. In Speaking of Courage, Norman could not talk about what happened because of his presumed PTSD, which ultimately resulted in his suicide. Similarly, in the stories set during the war we see how it immediately changes the men, causing them to grow hard and vulgar in their pain. The most noticeable example of this in The Things They Carried is in the baby buffalo scene of How to Tell a True War Story. In this scene, Rat Kiley is mourning Curt Lemon’s death and decides to take his emotions out on a baby buffalo the group finds, shooting it countless times. Another man kicks the animal after Rat walks away and the group decides to throw it in a well. Tina Chen, in her "Unraveling the Deeper Meaning": Exile and the Embodied Poetics of Displacement in Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried",

The Things They Carried, a collection of related short stories that appears grounded in O'Brien's own "real" combat experience even as it insists upon war as an endless fiction, ponders the complexities of such connections.

This is a way for O’Brien to learn to cope with some of the things he went through in the war.

Another reason behind writing The Things They Carried would be the need to tell the truth of war. Ultimately, as O’Brien writes in How To Tell A True War Story: “It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story . . . And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen” (85). Love is blatantly mentioned multiple times throughout the stories, especially with Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and Linda, but not every story so clearly has this theme. However, dig a little deeper and love can be found in nearly, if not every story in this