The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien: An Analysis

Bowker is back home trying to readjust to life after the war. He didn’t know how to act or what to say, and others didn’t know what to say to him. Norman carried the weight of the shame and guilt that the war caused from the death of Kiowa, of whom he felt he could have saved. Norman could not stop thinking about the war and could even tell what time it was based on the sun, “The sun was lowered now. Five fifty five, he decided.

Readers, especially those reading historical fiction, always crave to find believable stories and realistic characters. Tim O’Brien gives them this in “The Things They Carried.” Like war, people and their stories are often complex. This novel is a collection stories that include these complex characters and their in depth stories, both of which are essential when telling stories of the Vietnam War. Using techniques common to postmodern writers, literary techniques, and a collection of emotional truths, O’Brien helps readers understand a wide perspective from the war, which ultimately makes the fictional stories he tells more believable.

Lastly I would like to bring up the story when O’Brien was telling us the story of Kiowa. “Norman Bowker remembered how he had taken ahold of kiowa 's boot and pulled hard, but how the smell was simply to much, and how he’d backed of and in that way had lost the silver star. ”(TTTC, Pg 153) Norman bowker gets overwhelmed with thoughts after he is talking about how he “could’ve” prevented himself from not getting the “silver Star.”

O’Brien writes about the time he received the draft to relate to his aim of creative truth, the truth of a story is in the mind of

O’Brien tells the readers about him reflecting back twenty years ago, he wonders if running away from the war were just events that happened in another dimension, he pictures himself writing a letter to his parents: “I’m finishing up a letter to my Parents that tells what I'm about to do and why I'm doing it and how sorry I am that I’d never found the courage to talk to them about it”(O’Brien 80). Even twenty years after his running from the war, O’Brien still feels sorry for not finding the courage to tell his parents about his decision of escaping to Canada to start a new life. O’Brien presented his outlook that even if someone was not directly involved in the war, this event had impacted them indirectly, for instance, how a person’s reaction to the war can create regret for important friends and

“That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future ... Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story” (36). The Things They Carried is a captivating novel that gives an inside look at the life of a soldier in the Vietnam War through the personal stories of the author, Tim O’Brien . Having been in the middle of war, O’Brien has personal experiences to back up his opinion about the war.

In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien expresses to the reader why the men went to the war and continued to fight it. In the first chapter, “The Things They Carried,” O’Brien states “It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather they were too frightened to be cowards.” The soldiers went to war not because they were courageous and ready to fight, but because they felt the need to go. They were afraid and coped with their lack of courage by telling stories (to themselves or aloud) and applied humor to the situations they encountered.

The metaphor of the pork product assembly line also extends to the military machine that drafts soldiers and sends them to war. In the story O 'Brien sets up paradoxical relationships that are revisited in various forms throughout the novel. One such paradox is that of courage and fear. He explains that he was "ashamed to be doing the right thing" in following his conscience and going to Canada. This metafictive means of imposing meaning on moral disorder and personal conflict is not the only storytelling O 'Brien does in this chapter.

“Silent Scream” In war conditions, sometimes soldiers are forced to do what they don’t want to do. This action, sometimes makes them feel guilty even if they weren’t. In the novel, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, the author emphasizes that the things soldiers carry in war, the people they killed, the soldier’s feelings, psychology, and the moral of what they have done cannot be all of the soldier’s responsibilities. Soldiers fear that they would be excluded from the society, and they’d be accused from all the wildness of the war because of what they have done.

In Tim O’Brien’s novel, “The Things They Carried,” about the Vietnam war, courage is described as a necessity for all soldiers. He uses both him and his comrade’s circumstances to describe this. Throughout the novel the motif of courage evolves as characters serve in the Vietnam War. Being drafted into the Vietnam war forced O’Brien to become a soldier and participate in the war. His distaste for the war made it difficult for him to find the mental courage to fight in Vietnam which he thought was avoidable.

A hidden thought Bowker has is that is wishes he didn’t have the desire to make his father proud. He does reveal this to Tim O’Brien. Since he did not save soldier Kiowa, Bowker did not receive the silver medal that his father wants. Aside from the guilt, he is unable to carry his pride because his father refuses to speak to him.

Also, Bowker would drive in his father's big Chevy and around a lake for hours. He wanted to explain the war to someone, but he thought that no one would understand. He decided to write a letter to Tim O’Brien asking him if Tim could write a story about his life after the war and how it caused him to feel like a part of him is gone. The letter had haunted O’Brien for months, but he finally sat down one morning and began writing. Several months later, he had felt like he had used storytelling to explain the life of Norman Bowker and decided to send him a copy.

Tim O'Brien's short story, "The Things They Carried", is a personal narrative of the time he served in the military during the Vietnam War. His experience in the war along with his platoon shows how soldiers have to conform to the specific image of a tough, brave, and emotionless warrior courageously fighting in the heat of battle. However, the story shows young soldiers who try to follow this image, but end up showing individuality by being their true selves. In the nature of war, most soldiers will try to conform to this image, however showing individuality isn't always a negative thing. At first, the group of very young soldiers who have just been drafted try to show their masculinity by hiding their true emotions such as fear.

Veterans who come back from war have trouble with feeling guilty from what they’ve seen happen and what they had to do. In war, guilt has detrimental effects on many of the soldiers even driving Norman Bowker to suicide. Tim O’Brien struggles to tell certain stories because of the effect guilt have on him and he says “Even now, I'll admit, the story makes me squirm. For more than twenty years

War not only impacts the nations involved, but their inhabitants too. Usually, the ones most directly affected are those on the battlefield. Within Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, through the perspective of a war veteran himself, he illustrated the psychological effects of relocation and of the brutal atmosphere that war was. O’Brien’s internal struggle began as he was contemplating what to do about his draft notice. His “hometown was a conservative little spot…,where tradition counted, and it was easy to imagine people… [talking about] the young O’Brien kid, and how [he was a] damned sissy [for] taking off for Canada” (O’Brien 42-43).