Tim O'Brien's the Things They Carried
In his book, The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien is allowing the reader to see the negative effects war has on people, especially on soldiers. Through a variety of short stories focused primarily on the Vietnam war, O'Brien illustrates the horror of war through exquisite detail of the violent nature that each soldier seemed to have adopted as time went on in Vietnam. By focusing not only on the physical things the men carried, but also on the intangible things, the reader can easily relate to the emotional cost of an ambiguous war. O'Brien paints a compelling picture of the gruesome side of war and how it cripples the human psyche, as well as delivering a convincing antiwar statement as a result of such an experience.
The violence that seems to become embedded in the soldiers is a major topic in O'Brien's novel. Through elaborate details that reveal the drastic change within the men, O'Brien creates within the reader an sense of understanding of the what of war does to people. This is an effective technique, as he ties these effects into the title of the book. For example, O'Brien has this to say about one of the soldiers, "Norman Bowker, otherwise a very gentle person, carried a Thumb...The Thumb was dark brown, rubbery to touch... It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen" (13). Before Vietnam, Bowker was a very good-natured person; however, war turned him into a hard-mannered, emotionally empty soldier, carrying a severed thumb as a trophy. The transformation shown through Bowker is an excellent example of the emotional change that a soldier might go through. Another example of this type of change was a soldier named "Ted Lavender adopted an orphaned puppy... Azar strapped it to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and squeezed the firing device" (36). Clearly, Azar's actions proved him to be very unstable.
In addition, O'Brien displays how the violence becomes normal after some time in Vietnam. For instance, his description of how Kiley killed the buffalo demonstrates a certain lack of emotion and regret when stating, "We came across a baby water buffalo... After supper...
Furthermore, in environments that are highly conducive to trauma, such as war or a paramilitary educational institution that is predominantly filled with Caucasian males who are permitted to attack one another during a certain period in their careers, conventional morals can also become distorted .The differences of right and wrong that apply to the outside world, the world that was inhabited by people before they left it to take place
At the same time, the style is expected to give the reader an idea of what is happening, and that too in a more refined version. In his language there are poetic references for the brutality and masculinity of war as feminine features. He has talked about the "star shaped hole" and this reminds most about the American flag as also the expectation of the country to kill and
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
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
Krajek points out that what she took from O'Brien's lecture was the fact that a fiction author can help the reader connect with the story in reality, even if the story is not true. "His lecture's overarching message illustrated his belief that fiction, while a product of a novelist's imagination and not true in the literal sense, gets closer to the meaning of emotional and spiritual truth" (Krajek, 2009). The
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
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