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What Was Going Through Cross By Tim O Brien

945 Words4 Pages

Tim O'Brien is an American novelist who served as a soldier in the Vietnam War. The topic of the book goes through the experiences of soldiers during the Vietnam War and expresses both the physical and metaphorical things the soldiers had to carry with them while deployed. His purpose for writing the book was to recount his personal experience in the Vietnam War and allow him to comment on the war. I chose this book because I thought it would be an interesting read and I would be able to learn more about how a soldier in the Vietnam War felt while deployed. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a story of his recalling of events that provides an honest depiction while maintaining an enjoyable read which shows how the soldiers were changed in the war. Tim O’Brien was born in 1946 in Austin, Minn. He served …show more content…

The author’s thesis, “And if they made it home alive, they carried unrelenting images of a nightmarish war that history is only beginning to absorb.” The author showed this by explaining what was going through Cross’ mind at the beginning and how it changes into guilt after losing one of his men, he then lives with that loss while believing his daydreaming and distractedness caused him to lose his men. Another time where he proved his thesis is when O’Brien tells of when a man nicknamed Lemon was killed. He recalls that a joke was told, he took a half step then a booby-trapped 105 round blew him into a tree. The memory of how it happened remains vivid and with thorough details and recalling the sequence of events that led to it, even after 20 years, some images cannot be so easily forgotten. The author has the bias that nothing good can come from war. He remembers the death that surrounded him, from the first body he saw of an old man to the men he served with who he would call a

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The short story “The Things They Carried”, by Tim O’Brien, is about the experience of a team of American soldiers in the Vietnam war (Julia Guance et al. 323). O’Brien fought in the war of Vietnam himself and used writing as a way to express the realities of war (322). His works are realistic, given his personal experience at war. Each soldier in the story “The Things They Carried” carry specific objects that reflect their personality and priorities. Jimmy Cross is a twenty-four-year-old, American First Lieutenant.

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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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In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried the narrator, Tim O’Brien, often blurs the lines between reality and fiction. As a young soldier, O’Brien recalls the Vietnam war including the sounds, sights, and his emotions, while 20 years later he again shares his feelings and experiences of the same event. This same event, however, is told differently in order to help him cope with the emotional pain of war. The details become blurry as the pain is too great to endure.

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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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The novel, “The Things They Carried”, is written by Tim O’Brien and is composed of short stories about O’Brien’s “experiences” in war. The setting is placed in various locations, but mainly around the 1950’s in Vietnam. Through his non-chronological stories, the reader learns about O’Brien’s experiences in the war along with the soldiers who were in his platoon. Through the book, we see both a memoir of the war and an autobiography, however, the book is considered fictional because of his storytelling technique. He writes how a true war story is hard to tell and elucidates the connection between storytelling and his war experience.

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-Introduction- The novel, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, is a narrative composed in a non-linear structure which consists of short stories all drawn from O’Brien's experiences during the war. Each of these short stories are linked together to portray the emotional aspects and burdens young men suffered during this time. For context, The Vietnam War was a conflict between South Vietnam and North Vietnam, with the U.S. as the South's ally. It resulted in over 300,000 American injuries and 58,000 deaths, with the average age of soldiers being only 19. This left many vulnerable to psychological and emotional difficulties at an early age.

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Within the novel The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien is attempting to show how hard it is in war and the things you have to carry to be able to make it through it morally and in order to survive. This book is about the Vietnam War and a group of soldiers that move together encountering many tasks and also talks about the things they must carry to survive. The author wrote this book to talk about his experiences and to show people that do not know how it is in a war a little bit of the reality of a war and how affecting it is on a person. The author Tim O’Brien wrote this book for the general public to read. He is the narrator of this book and throughout the book, he writes as though he is talking to the reader.

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“I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth”(O’Brien 171). In “The Things They Carried” Tim O’Brien describes his experience and many other soldiers experiences in the Vietnam war. This book is based off his memory, imagination and storytelling which depicts many perspectives of life before, during and after war. Tim O’Brien uses imagery and symbolism to address that war destroys innocent people and at the same time soliders loss of innocence.

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Almost all of the chapters in this book are narrated in a unique way. O’Brien emphasizes the theme of shame in his novel. The author uses this word in many different cases, the majority of which are connected to war and its characteristics. O’Brien argues that a soldier’s greatest motivation for going to and staying in the war is a fear of shame, even though many other factors can be considered as well like women.

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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.

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In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, he tells the story through narrative perspective, character development, setting, and symbolic elements. By using both first-person and third-person narratives, O'Brien provides multiple sides of the Vietnam War experience. Each story has a protagonist facing a different conflict, contributing to a number of individual struggles. The settings serve by shaping the individual stories and the experiences of the characters. Recurring characters, places, and objects emerge as symbols, having many different meanings.

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O’Brien’s intended audience was young people who were not educated about the war and he discussed the themes shame/guilt and mortality/death. The chapter “The Things They Carried” gives an introduction about the men in the group, it also shows shame/guilt. The chapter talks about the equipment each soldier carried and how it affected them. During this chapter it focuses primarily on LT.

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The Things They Carried is work of historical fiction that was published in America in 1990. This book is one of many narratives about the Vietnam war written by Tim O’Brien, a Vietnam war veteran. In the The Things They Carried, the author recounts and shares the experiences of a group of soldiers in the Vietnam war. In the Interactive Oral, O’Brien reveals that his reason for publishing this book was to express how he felt about the abstractness of war, and he accomplished this through fabricated stories. O’Brien also tries to communicate to the reader that war is not always necessary, he gives an example of how a bullet might kill an enemy but that same bullet can create an enemy, this expresses his feeling of futility towards the Vietnam

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Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried plays two roles in the book as a writer and a soldier. The Things They Carried is a memoir about the draft and the Vietnam War. It focuses on the life of Tim O’Brien but also Lt. Cross and many other characters and their journey around the Vietnam War. The experience that Tim O’Brien writes about in the Vietnam War uses as many physical and emotional feelings throughout the memoir. His hatred towards the war and how war separates characters created two narratives during the war and after the war.

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Tim O’Brien’s novelThe Things They Carried focuses on the US war in Vietnam. In this novel the author providesnumerous details about the war and tries to rise as many themes as possible which are important according to the situation. O’Brien was a participant in the war himself. Almost all of the chapters in this book are narrated in a unique way. O’Brien emphasizes the theme of shame in his novel.

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