By now Cross has ordered his men to burn the area where Lavender died, and they have moved elsewhere. But none of that erases the images in Jimmy Cross's mind of Ted Lavender's corpse.
As O'Brien depicts the aftermath, during that same evening, of Ted Lavender's preventable death from Jimmy Cross's now-pathetic perspective:
while Kiowa explained how Lavender had died, Lieutenant Cross found himself trembling.
He tried not to cry.
He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war. ("The
Things They Carried," p. 279)
Later on, with Cross's men now having burned down the area in which Lavender has died, and then been marched by their lieutenant to a new location, the reality, for the clearly culpable First Lieutenant Cross himself, of the true cause of Lavender's death earlier that day - one he himself most likely could and should have prevented - sinks in even more painfully. That night, once Cross is again alone with his thoughts, and also can have the protective camouflage of darkness, Jimmy Cross:.".. sat at the bottom of his foxhole and wept. It went on for a long while" (O'Brien, "The Things They Carried," p. 279).
And today's events, further, have produced within Cross's tortured mind the realization of yet another most unhappy truth. As O'Brien further tells us, within this same scene:
In part, he was grieving for Ted Lavender, but mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she belonged to another world, which was not quite real, and because she was a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey, a poet and a virgin and uninvolved, and because he realized she did not love him and never would. (O'Brien)
Additionally, Cross's private torture tonight goes undetected by the men around him, and while this is, of course, the lieutenant's intention, the fact that it does so also underscores for the reader the essential aloneness with which each man,...
I can make myself feel again (O'Brien, p. 180). And, through story truth, what the story is able to do for O'Brien, it becomes able also to do for the reader. In "The Lives of the Dead," O'Brien further elaborates on his need for stories universally. Through make-believe -- imagination, stories, fiction -- O'Brien finds that he can not only resurrect the dead but also lay a barrier between himself and
This never happens. It is important to note, however, that regardless if the girls heard him or not, Sammy was the hero because he followed through. He knew his life would change and he knew things would not be as he had imagined but he was willing to accept that. Like the narrator in "On the Rainy River," he does not realize the impact his choice will have on
In short, it takes a little bravery to think about things in a serious manner and this includes our thoughts regarding courage. O'Brien writes, "Proper courage is wise courage (133) and it is also acting "wisely when fear would have a man act otherwise. It is the endurance of the soul in spite of fear -- wisely" (133). Courage is not something that can be conjured up on a
It is very difficult to reach a conclusion regarding "The Things They Carried" and the purpose for which O'Brien wrote it. While a first look on the collection of books is probable to provide someone with the feeling that it is easy to read and does not involve a lot of strong feelings, the truth is that this is what the writer intended it to look like. Not only is
Tim O'Brien's the Things They Carried The most shocking aspects of the novel, The Things They Carried, are the graphic descriptions and the striking honesty with which Tim O'Brien employs to describe the devastating effects of war. Several stories are written with an honesty that reveals the horrors of war as well as the frailty of the human spirit. The most moving of these stories are "The Man I Killed" and
psychological consequences of war, of fighting in a war, of eating and sleeping in a "war zone," are not merely limited to the implications of witnessing and partaking in death; war deeply influences the mental attitudes of those involved because of the organizational framework of power and authority that soldiers are subject to. The common assumption is that soldiers' troubles coping with war are somehow linked to the extraordinary
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