Curt Lemon Character Analysis Essay

O’Brien’s use of imagery vividly describes the Vietnamese soldier he killed in the heat of the war. For example, O’Brien, a soldier of the war says, “His jaw in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his

Marcus Lemonis is best known for his appearance on the CNBC TV Show The Profit. On the show Marcus takes on the task of saving struggling business that have come to him for help before they lose it all. Throughout the show, Marcus initiates strategies, develops plans, and works with the owners to do whatever it takes to turn a profit and make the business successful again. Marcus invests his personal money into the dying business for a share of profits or a percentage of ownership in the company. Being personally invested helps to let the owners know that he too has something to lose if the company doesn’t turn around. Marcus uses his philosophy, people, product and process, throughout every show. “It's all about building a customer service

Through The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien moves beyond the horror of fighting in the Vietnam War to examine with sensitivity and insight the nature of courage and fear. Included, is a collection of interrelated stories. A few of the stories are brutal, while others are flawed, blurring the distinction between fact and fiction. All the stories, however, deal with one platoon. Some are about the wartime experiences of soldiers, and others are about a 43-year-old writer reminiscing about his platoon’s experiences. In the beginning chapter, O’Brien rambles about the items the soldiers carry into battle, ranging from can openers, pocketknives, and mosquito repellent o

In Tim’s first up-close and personal encounter with death, Linda, his girlfriend, dies of cancer before turning ten. When Tim attends her wake and sees her body, he is unable to cope with the reality of her death. Instead, he imagines that she is awake and normal and having a conversation with him. Through this conversation with a dead person, Tim comes to realize that his imagination - the stories that he makes up - can keep people alive after their deaths. If he remembers Linda’s corpse, that is all she can ever be, but if he continues to have conversations with her, to imagine her alive, to tell stories about her, then she remains alive as he portrays her. Though told at the end of the book, this vignette becomes a lens through which Tim views death throughout and explains why Tim, the character, and O’brien, the author, tell stories about dead friends. Tim tells stories about death - the death of his friend Kiowa, the postwar suicide of Norman Bowker, the corpse of the man he killed, the tragic accident that killed Ted Lavender, and Linda’s battle with cancer - to preserve the life of people he

In this story Tim O’ Brien, the author, is the main character. What a little bit strange is, is the fact that he is the protagonist but also the antagonist. In this story Tim O’ Brien must decide between 2 things. He can choose to do something honorable and report for the war or he must obey this conscious and either go to jail in Canada. This process teaches him a lot about himself and he learns that people who do brave things are only motivated by embarrassment of shame. After a certain period O’ Brien goes to Vietnam and carries a new sense of shame with him. Once there he found a war where soldiers carry all manner of weaponry. They carry fear, hate, guilt, love, dreams, and blame. They used tough, coarse, language to make the war seem less real. Most of all, as they marched from village to village, they carried the question ‘what’s it all for?’ Looking back now, he realizes that the war is now reduced to stories. Stories put a spin on the war, make it seem less painful, less real. Tim O’ Brien is a member of Alpha Company and they have a lot to carry for. The men of the Alpha Company march, fight, camp, joke, dream, and die. Those elements came all back in this book. The book tells the story of those men before and after the war to give the reader a picture from how the situation was during the war and how the war affected them later. An important major event is the death

O’Brien was a Vietnam War soldier that experienced the horrors of war first-hand, reliving the moments of the battlefield in the war as well as at home. The “things they carried” were not just their war equipment, but also the emotional and psychological baggage that they had. This emotional baggage weighs in on their conscience and disturbs the peace in their dreams. O’Brien states that “a true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models for proper human behavior”(O’Brien 65). Throughout the book O’Brien puts an effort into exposing the reality of what a “true war story” sounds like. He remarks that any story that makes “you feel uplifted” is a complete falsehood and claims that “you have been made the victim of very old and terrible lie”(O’Brien 65).

Tim O’Brien’s compelling book about the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried, is a benevolent tale about an American soldier dealing with the internal struggles of raw virtue and thoughtful reflection. The book’s narrator incorporates a unique style that allows the reader to involve themselves in before, during, and post Vietnam War experiences. In addition to the wide range of time periods, O’Brien distorts the differences between fact and fiction allowing the reader to become closer to the emotional and mental state soldiers faced in the Vietnam War. Similar to a common soldier on the battlefield, The Things They Carried offers the ghostly feel and the absence of clarity soldiers are faced with. In contrast, many critics argue that O’Brien’s

During this work, O’Brien keeps a casual tone. It sometimes gets more formal and serious, but for the most part, it’s friendly and almost playful. When he is describing the conversations he had with his friends, he looks back on them with happiness. Consequently, when he is describing the death of one of his friends, his tone gets more somber and less playful. For example, the entire chapter of “Stockings” is devoted to describing the soldier Henry Dobbins and an interesting knack of his. “Even now, twenty years later, I can see him wrapping his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck before heading out on an ambush.” This cute, two page chapter provides a bit of relief after the chapter about Mary Anne Belle. It has light connotations and is a generally funny short story. Later in the book, however, he gets more serious when talking about the death of his dear friend Kiowa. He

The seductive allure of war in O’Brien’s novel, “The Things They Carried,” is linked to the tendencies of human nature in men. War acts as a catalyst for many causing them to become more primal versions of themselves or “human killing machines.” O’Brien revisits the idea of man losing himself numerous times adding in subtle variations of his own life experiences and inconstant propensity to make witness to and offer detailed accounts of coping mechanisms and grief in attempt to gain control over the chaos of the war by creating a story of survival. During the war, American soldiers carried patriotic derision on their shoulders, however, after the war, they were exposed to unnecessary psychological effects that in many ways were worse than the war itself. Soldiers during the war felt a strong sense of isolation from their friends, families, and communities back home.

Tim O’Brien is a great example of lost innocence. He gives full proof examples on how his innocence was lost, not only in the war, but before the war as well. O’Brien (character) speaks into depth about his loss of innocence in the last chapter of the novel, The Lives of the Dead, here he tells the story of how he experienced love and death at the same time. Linda was O’Brien 's (character) first love, when they were nine years old they fell in love, and the character O’Brien describes that although they were so young he truly felt that this was true love. Linda had cancer, and soon after their first date Linda passed away. She was the first loss of innocence for him, she was the first dead body he had ever seen, and that was extremely hard on him, as it would be for any nine year old, or anyone seeing someone they thought they were deeply in love with. Linda was the reason that O’Brien began writing in the first place. In order to make sense of his life O’Brien began to write to deal with the hard times. He believes that stories can help you deal with the issues in your life, reflecting on the good times, or fantasizing about what you want to actually occur. “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the

O’Brien uses a plethora of writing styles throughout The Things They Carried. He changes his style of writing based on what he wants the reader to take away from a scene. For instance, O’Brien is incredibly descriptive while explaining how Curt Lemon dies. By explaining how “the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss,” the author finds the beauty in a very gruesome death (O’Brien 67). O’Brien also chooses to use descriptive language to convey tragedy when he describes the man that he has killed. By starting the chapter “The Man I Killed” with such a detailed description of the young man followed by that young man’s

The short story that will be discussed, evaluated, and analyzed in this paper is a very emotionally and morally challenging short story to read. Michael Meyer, author of the college text The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature, states that the author of How to Tell a True War Story, Tim O’Brien, “was drafted into the Vietnam War and received a Purple Heart” (472). His experiences from the Vietnam War have stayed with him, and he writes about them in this short story. The purpose of this literary analysis is to critically analyze this short story by explaining O’Brien’s writing techniques, by discussing his intended message and how it is displayed, by providing my own reaction,

Owen personifies death, giving him readily identifiable human characteristics as spitting and coughing, but in a way that accords with the gruesome nature of death since he spits “bullets” and coughs “shrapnel.” What is really striking is that the soldiers welcome death's claim of their lives; they “chorused if he sang aloft” and “whistled while he shaved [them] with his scythe.” Although evoking the death-as-a-reaper conceptualization,

Written by author Tim O’Brien after his own experience in Vietnam, “The Things They Carried” is a short story that introduces the reader to the experiences of soldiers away at war. O’Brien uses potent metaphors with a third person narrator to shape each character. In doing so, the reader is able to sympathize with the internal and external struggles the men endure. These symbolic comparisons often give even the smallest details great literary weight, due to their dual meanings. The symbolism in “The Things They Carried” guides the reader through the complex development of characters by establishing their humanity during the inhumane circumstance of war, articulating what the men need for emotional and spiritual survival, and by revealing

He used such descriptive words to explain how much suffering soldiers really faced and when they were “flung” (Owen 18) into the wagon it tells the reader how much perseverance soldiers had to continue fighting. Words like “guttering, choking, drowning” (Owen 16) shows the reader exactly what a soldier is feeling when he is being gassed. Graphic images were shown in this poem like “the blood / come gargling from the forth-corrupted lungs” (Owen 21-22) it just gives the reader such a clear and descriptive image in their head as to what exactly the writer wanted you to know. Disgust, this is another emotion the reader gets a sense of towards the end of the poem. Owen is trying to tell the reader how disgusting the whole concept of war really