While he pretended, she was "elusive on the matter of love" (1). While she might have signed her letters with love, Jimmy "knew better" (2) but the idea made him feel better so he allowed himself the luxury of living in the fantasy. Jimmy's guilt for Ted's death was "like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war" (16). Jimmy must work through this emotion, which is like "both love and hate" (17) and something he cannot escape. The "heavy-duty hurt" (17) he felt helped the others see how he cared for them. Viet Nam is one of the worst nightmares in American history. Never has the country been so divided over issues no one clearly understood. Without a clear enough reason for war, the government had to deal with growing concerns of faulty leadership. The war was long and painful with answers no arriving soon enough. Soldiers were simply emotionally drained. Meanwhile, American citizens were weary of losing sons and daughters to a seemingly worthless war. With no end in sight and negotiations leading nowhere fast, the country found itself fighting two battles. The most significant of these was what took place in the mind of the soldiers. The Things They Carried reinforces a painful mindset, asking us to consider our viewpoints about war, especially when it comes to the glory of war. O'Brien states that this war had "no sense of strategy or mission," which negates anything glorious or brave. Horror and fear seem to be words more compatible with the Viet Nam war more than anything else. O'Brien says, "I was drafted to fight a war I hated . . . The American war seemed to me wrong" and "I was a liberal, for Christ's sake: if they needed fresh bodies, why not draft some back-to-the-stone-age-hawk?" (44). He admits embarrassment is associated with why he went to Vietnam and he confesses his unstoppable sense of fear kept him from crossing the border. He writes, "I couldn't risk the embarrassment . . . I couldn't endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule . . . I was a coward. I went to the war" (58). O'Brien sprinkles such truths throughout the novel and asks us to reconsider our beliefs about war and fighting with tales of real men in real...
When we read about Norman Bowker, who blames himself Kiowa's death, O'Brien is quick to states that Bowker had "been braver than he ever thought possible, but . . . he had not been so brave as he wanted to be" (142). This idea captures the constant struggle of soldiers fighting in any war. The need to be brave is overshadowed by the reality of never seeming to be brave enough.
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
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
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
Truth and Memory in the Things They Carried Tim O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried, is more than a novel because it allows the reader to experience the Vietnam War in a personal way and it allows O'Brien the opportunity to bring closure to the entire war experience. Throughout the novel, O'Brien reminds readers he is telling a story and that the story may or may not be fiction. The point
1). The character in the novel/author 'Tim' never believed in the cause of the Vietnam War, and nearly fled to Canada to avoid serving. That decision to servie affected him in an unalterable fashion, and O'Brien's recounts the story of Vietnam to himself, in both truthful and fanciful ways, to make sense of his experience. Yet every re-telling removes him farther and farther away from the realities of the experience,
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