The Things They Carried By Tim O ' Brien

Imagery is identified in “Sunrise Over Fallujah” to emphasize the dark tone throughout the book. “I seen a 240 take a guy’s leg off from a 100 yards...The whole leg came off and the sucker was just laying there on the ground, looking at his leg as he died” states a big-headed corporal (chapter 2 pg 37-38). His statement describes a gruesome scene of someone dying. This allows the audience to envision what it would be like to fight in Iraq/Afghanistan and puts them in the perspective of a soldier's shoes, part of unit that is most hated.

Throughout the chapter, O’Brien uses unendurable imagery. He creates images of the obstacles that the soldiers are going through and how hard it was to get through these obstacles. For example, the soldiers had to walk during the nights when it was pure black and so dark you couldn’t even tell you were blinking, “the blackness didn’t change,”(209). During the trail walks, Henry Dobbins and Norman Bowker were afraid of being separated that they rigged up a long piece of wire and tied it to their belts between them. O’Brien also creates images of the dead soldiers lying on the

The novel The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien begins by Mr. O'Brien describing his dramatical events that happened during the middle of his Vietnam experience while he was fighting in the war. Mr. O'Brien received his draft notice in the month of June in the year of 1968. When he received this notice Mr. O'Brien had feelings of confusion, and that drove him to go north to the Canadian border, and it had him contemplating if he wanted to cross it or not because he does not want to be forced to fight in a war he really does not believe in. However, Mr. O'Brien finally decides that he would feel guilty if he avoided the war and he also feared that his family would be disappointed. Not only does this novel tell us readers about his

The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, transports the reader into the minds of veterans of the Vietnam conflict. The Vietnam War dramatically changed Tim O’Brien and his comrades, making their return home a turbulent and difficult transition. The study, titled, The War at Home: Effects of Vietnam-Era Military Service on Post-War Household Stability, uses the draft lottery as a “natural experiment” on the general male population. The purpose of the NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) study is to determine the psychological effects of the Vietnam War on its veterans. In order to do this, they tested four conditions, marital stability, residential stability, housing tenure, and extended family living. However, it

In the story The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien didn’t mention anything about traditional war heroes. I think this was a great idea, because there are no traditional war heroes. A traditional war hero is someone who is fearless and someone who can’t be harmed mentally or emotionally. But in The Things They Carried the soldiers out on the front lines were emotionally and physically scarred. Tim O’Brien didn’t write about traditional war heroes, O’Brien wrote about normal people, people with different views on the Vietnam war, and how the war affected these people.

20) O’Brien tells how these young men were drafted which were constantly in fear, they wished to be there obliviously but war takes up all of one’s attention; it played a big role in their life, changing their tactics, personality and becoming a new person. O’Brien uses this to show the stressful moments in war where one has pressure to be alive and in this case to fit in with everyone else and feel part of something, in a lonely place such as the war.

Prompt: In a well-developed essay, explain how Tim O’Brien in pages 76-78 of The Things They Carried uses rhetorical and literary devices to argue what he believes constitutes a true war story. In this excerpt from The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien discusses a common theme found in the entire novel: the important components of a “true war story. "

The Things They Carried is a war story based on the Vietnam War. One story the author, Tim O 'Brien tells is the story of Mary Anne, Mark Fossie’s childhood sweetheart. Mary Anne’s curiosity allows her to acquire knowledge about Vietnam’s culture and language. She wants to learn about Vietnam, the war and what they do. She also isn’t afraid and is eager to aid the casualties. One night she goes out on an ambition with the Green Berets, and the next day she and Fossie become engaged. Eventually she disappears for 3 weeks only to arrive at the special forces hut, and when seen Mary Anne is wearing the same outfit as before, but with a necklace of human tongues around her neck. She says what happened isn’t bad. In the end, she crossed to the other side never coming back, becoming one with the land. Mary Anne symbolizes war soldiers going through the war getting consumed by the darkness of the war.

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien expresses the importance of a story-truth, as opposed to a happening-truth by use of literary elements in his writing. The novel is about war and the guilt it leaves on everyone involved in the war. Story-truth is not exactly what happened, but uses part of the truth and part made up in order to express the truth of what emotion was felt, which an important thematic element in the novel is. The three literary devices he uses to express this are diction, imagery, juxtaposition, and hyperbole. All of these elements allow the reader to identify emotion that is expressed in each story, as though that were the complete truth.

The author enhanced the characters of these soldiers by using descriptive words to describe them, bringing the audience in the story. This is an important imagery in the text because it shows the actions of the soldiers, fighting for their lives. The specific statistic such as “two perimeters” and “360-degree battlefield” emphasizes the danger they are in, exposing the possible deaths because getting killed could come from any angle. The knowledge and time they have are useful for them to stay alive. Thus, imagery can also be a backbone for futuristic actions or what the author intended.

O’Brien’s use of imagery allows him to paint a vivid depiction of the horrors experienced by the foot soldiers in Vietnam. These horrors perpetuate the physical and emotional

Many authors use storytelling as a vehicle to convey the immortality of past selves and those who have passed to not only in their piece of literature but in their life as an author. In Tim O’Brien’s work of fiction The Things They Carried, through his final chapter “The Lives of the Dead,” O 'Brien conveys that writing is a matter of survival since, the powers of storytelling can ensure the immortality of all those who were significant in his life. Through their immortality, O’Brien has the ability to save himself with a simple story. Through snippets of main plot event of other chapters, O’Brien speaks to the fact the dead have not actually left; they are gone physically, but not spiritually or emotionally. They live on in memories as Linda lives on in the memories of O’Brien and as many of his war buddies live on through his stories. He can revive them and bring them back to the world through his writings and through these emotions or events he experienced with them and with their deaths can make them immortal. Through the reminiscent stories of Linda and O’Brien’s war companions and himself, O’Brien conveys that storytelling allows people to reanimate others who have died and past selves to create an immortality of humans.

Initially as the story progresses, imagery is a commonly used literary device used by O’Brien to draw the reader in to the story. For instance, in the text it states, “Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid april” (O’Brien 2). This was a sentence from an excerpt describing what each soldier was required to carry and what some soldiers carried for personal reasons. This quote emphasizes how the soldiers would carry anything they could to have an belief that they had some form of security, though ultimately this security was a false from the embrace of death. Another example of this is “Almost everyone humped photographs” (3). Photographs provide comfort to soldiers going through an extremely stressful scenario. However, photographs in this context are a symbol of memories, and desires. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’ pictures of Martha were his way of expressing his love for her.

Death defines life; it has the ability to reinvent the living for better or worse. “The Things They Carried”, by Tim O’Brien, provides a non-linear, semi-fictitious account of the Vietnam War that poignantly depicts the complicated relationship between life and death. His account breathes subtle vitality and realism into the lingering presence of the dead, intimating that the memories they impart have as profound an impact as the living.

Every one of us has experienced a strong emotional fear, and in that moment of stress, we learn more about who we are. The short story “The Things They Carried”, by Tim O’Brien, follows the lives of soldiers trying to survive the emotional and physical stresses of the Vietnam War. Throughout the story, O’Brien juxtaposes the physical weight of the supplies that the soldiers must carry with the immeasurable weight of their intense emotional experiences. The theme of “The Things They Carried” is the burden of fear, which O’Brien portrays through the counter-weight of objects the soldiers cling to for consolation and escape. Some men turn to objects that remind them of love, no matter how unlikely it is that they are loved back. Other men