Kiowa's Death In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

Death is something that occurs often in a war due to the violence and dangerous areas. Everyone takes on the thought of someone dying in different ways, whether they maintained a close relationship with the person or not guilt could become an instant reaction of the persons' death because of a feeling of maybe being responsible for the death that occurred. The thought of maybe being responsible for one of the soldiers that you have spent day night serving with could leave an enormous amount of guilt in one person. When witnessing a death or anything traumatic it is easy to blame someone else or even yourself for the tragic accident. Multiple characters in the book The Things They Carried demonstrated the guilt and responsibility of another

In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the reader receives insight as to what soldiers experienced during the Vietnam War and what thoughts consumed their minds in those times of hardship and heartache. As Americans, we typically picture military men and women as emotionally and physically strong, while in reality, that may not be the case. They deal with more emotional and physical trauma than we come to understand. People who carry physical or emotional burdens tend to seek some kind of release or do something to feel relieved of their burdens. O’Brien uses stories about the men in his platoon to depict how soldiers are bound by their own emotional weights, and each have a different way of trying to release themselves from those tensions.

Tim O’Brien never lies. While we realise at the end of the book that Kiowa, Mitchell Sanders and Rat Kiley are all fictional characters, O’Brien is actually trying to tell us that there is a lot more truth hidden in these imagined characters than we think. This suggests that the experiences he went through were so traumatic, the only way to describe it was through the projection of fictional characters. O’Brien explores the relationship between war experiences and storytelling by blurring the lines between truth and fiction. While storytelling can change and shape a reader’s opinions and perspective, it might also be the closest in helping O’Brien cope with the complexity of war experiences, where the concepts like moral and immorality are being distorted.

It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning.” (61) That quote describes how painful it was for the men to listen to innocent creature slowly die. The horses have done no bad deed, they just happened to be standing where the shots were fired and were hit instead of the enemy. This shows how war creates a loss of innocence, in multiple aspects. While the men were listening to the horses cry for hours, waiting to be put out of their misery, the men become depressed.

Kiowa knows it is wrong to bring war into a place of peace. With this peace of mind, it shows how good of a person Kiowa is. It showed why people like him as a person. In a like manner, O’Brien discusses morality in the chapter “The Man I Killed.”

In this chapter, O’Brien used repetition, a motif, and symbolism to stress the futility of the Vietnam war. First off, the word “Rain” is repeated numerous times throughout the chapter. This repetitious motif symbolizes war, as the war is all around, like how the word is all around the chapter. Furthermore, O’Brien used “Rain” when referring to everlasting events in the story, alongside setting a sad tone (war is never a happy event). For instance, during the hard trek through the waterlogged Song Tra Bong, the rain pounded on the men as they sought out Kiowa.

In The things They Carried, by Tim O’brien in that field there are two people that take responsibility for Kiowa’s death, whether it be directly or indirectly, they truly had not no control of what would happen that night. Jimmy Cross blames him self for the death of Kiowa because he chose the position and listened to the orders from the top. He could have lied and change their location to protect his men but he did not. The other solider who took responsibility was the young boy that was never named. The boy had been distracted and had a lapse in his judgment.

Betrayal is a common theme in literature. In his novel Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane creates an exemplar of betrayal through his portrayal of Henry’s perspective of current events. Through his representation of Henry’s betrayal, Crane depicts a youth’s naivety, the universe’s disregard for human life, and the development of Wilson’s character. Henry’s perspective is the core of Crane’s novel, and Crane portrays it in order to reveal the harsh realization of Henry’s petty delusions. Henry believes in traditional models of courage and honor.

The person had to deal with death and the reality of war under the worst case scenario. Bob “Rat” Kiley was that soldier and one of the many soldiers that left something in the war. He had lost his friend Curt Lemon and that’s the first sign that the war has been turning to be painful for him. This coping mechanism for the death was to write letters to lemon’s sister and he shot a baby Water Buffalo. This coping mechanism is seen in the chapter “How to tell a true war story”, shows how he has been affected and explained the toll the war had taken on him.

In the chapter when he describes the man he kills, he talks about the state of the dead body by saying, “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole…the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him” (O’Brien Chapter 11). This brutal and horrifying imagery displays an irrefutable element of truth to O’Brien’s writing. Not only does this imagery highlight the truth to his writing, but it also sheds light on the brutal truth about the war in Vietnam. By using imagery as such a strong rhetorical device in his writing, he gives the average person a taste of just how barbaric and cruel Vietnam felt for the people who experience the war first hand on either side of the fighting. Tim O’Brien gives a very detailed and intense description of his time fighting in Vietnam during their war with America.

In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, the author skillfully presents a paradox about war and how it is both horrible and beautiful. Through O’Brien’s vivid storytelling and sorrowful anecdotes, he is able to demonstrate various instances which show both the horrible and beautiful nature of war. Within the vulnerability of the soldiers and the resilience found in the darkest of circumstances, O’brien is able to show the uproarious emotional landscape of war with a paradox that serves as the backbone of the narrative. In the first instance, O’Brien explores the beauty in horror within the chapter “Love.”

Djanie 1 Pfeffel Djanie Michael Rambadt Eng 102 11/17/16 Death and Its Impact on Characters in Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried’ and Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Demon Lover’: War and death are themes that often come together in many literary works. Tim O’Brien in his works The Things They Carried and Ambush together with Elizabeth Bowen in her text Demon Lover explore these themes.

THE PURPOSE OF AMBIGUITY by Floor ‘The Man I Killed’ is a chapter in Tim O’Brien’s book filled with a collection of short stories named ‘The Things They Carried’(TTTC). TTTC contains autobiographic stories that occurred during Tim O’Brien’s served time in the 23rd infantry in the Vietnam War. The title of the chapter, ‘The Man I Killed’, implies that the narrator killed a man. Conversely, there are several passages in the text that suggest that the narrator did not kill anyone. This ambiguity found in the collected short stories by Tim O’Brien purposes to implement chaos, and therefore to let the reader experience the unsettling chaos of war.

Entry #12- Type 1 “The Man I Killed” Quote: “Then later he said, 'Tim, it 's a war. The guy wasn 't Heidi – he had a weapon, right? It 's a tough thing, for sure, but you got to cut out that staring. '” (O 'Brien 120).

In a scene where Curt Lemon accidentally steps on a mine and is torn into many pieces, his closest comrade, Rat Kiley, has trouble grieving the loss of his friend. In a furious state, Kiley tortures a water buffalo. This scene represents the emotional and physical torture the men in Vietnam are subjected to. Both the soldiers in Vietnam and the water buffalo are in a position where their lives are out of their control. Just as the water buffalo was tortured to death, most of the men in Alpha Company feel helpless in their situation.