Summary Of The Things They Carried 'By Tim O' Brien

The book The Things They Carried was a book about a platoon of American Soldiers in the Vietnam War. Tim O'Brien wrote the book as the Author. Published on March 28 1990, with 233 pages. In the book the men had set up camp, which later found out to be a sink hole. The moltar started coming off the camp.

The book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a collection of stories from the Vietnam War. Tim O’Brien was drafted into the war in 1968 and remained there until 1970 (“The Things They Carried”, N.d.). Kiowa is a Native American and he is gentle and peaceful. He discourages excessive violence but understands difficult decisions of war may not always please his gentle nature. Even though Kiowa strongly opposes excessive violence he later finds his platoon under attack and tragically loses his life fighting for a war he did not fully agree with.

In Tim O’brien’s short story, “The Things They Carried,” O’brien explains more than just what people face at war. O’Brien gives detail of each burden, struggle, and memory each soldier carries into the war. He describes of a battle more destructive than a war filled with guns, bombs, and knives. He describes of a mind battle, one in which is the hardest any man can face. A mind battle controls your every decision.

The Things They Carried is a harrowing story about the trials and tribulations of the Vietnam War by author and veteran Tim O’Brien. However, the qualities of the characters and the tangible/intangible things they carry with them are applicable to anybody who has witnessed the tragedies of war for themselves. O’Brien shows us the things these soldiers carry - and what they mean to them - through details, repetition, and a blunt tone. First, O’Brien shows the physical things the soldiers carry by listing them. Basic and/or regulatory items they have are stated, such as “safety picks, trip flares, signal flares, spools of wire, razor blades, chewing tobacco,” etc.

The Things They Carried details a young naive man’s life that changes after being drafted into the Vietnam War. The author Tim O’Brien shares with us the many tragedies that are engraved in his memory. Throughout the book he tells stories about the lives(right) of the dead. As he writes the stories, he dreams about the dead, so in his mind they are alive and have returned back into the world. The reader can feel the struggle that Tim has in relieving the pain of losing these people.

War, in whatever form it may be, significantly affects an individual’s life and postwar identity. The experiences one must endure place a tattoo, an imprint on one’s past and future. This permanent marker of the atrocities of war and of the psychological effects of violence remains with a soldier throughout his or her life. In the novel, The Things They Carried, narrator and protagonist, Tim O’ Brien, uses his gift of pen to illustrate his personal experience in the Vietnam War. His collection of stories, blurred by lines of fact and fiction, highlights the importance of the act of storytelling rather than the objective truth of a war story.

The Lives of the Dead. In October of 2012 I visited the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC. I walked down the ramp examining the wall and the list of names on it. As we searched for the name of a friend of my Grandfather, an army veteran that served with him in Vietnam.

Title and author The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
 2. Major characters: their roles in the story and relationship, summarize what drives them (motivation) Tim O’Brien: O’Brien serves as both the narrator and protagonist in The Things They Carried and conveys his messages through storytelling. By telling of his own experiences and those of his friends, O’Brien works through all that plagued him during the war—his reluctance to join the war effort, the death of his friends, the guilt of killing, etc.

The Things They Carried is an ugly book. The themes and topics throughout the book are gruesome and horrific, but Tim O’Brien writes about them in such a way that portrays the Vietnam War as almost beautiful. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the chapter, “The Man I Killed” is an example of a terrific piece of writing because it utilizes thoughtful symbolism, graphic imagery, and conflict to portray the Vietnam War in an accurate way. “The Man I Killed” uses symbols, imagery, and conflict to tell an accurate war story. First, O’Brien uses symbolism throughout the book, but specifically in “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien writes about the symbol of a butterfly.

The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, is a great collection of short stories about a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War. Perhaps some would feel that all of these stories are entirely unrelated; however, I believe that they all somehow come together to create one ultimate message. I truthfully think that one short section of the text can represent O’Brien’s entire collection. The idea of the emotional baggage that these American soldiers carry shows up in various stories in the book, as well as plays a major role in O’Brien’s final message. What strikes me as a reader is that soldiers carry more than just physical memorabilia; they endure and carry all of the emotional baggage that comes with the job.

In W.H. Auden’s Funeral Blues (pg. 762), the poem takes place shortly after the speaker’s beloved has passed away and shows how the speaker is forever changed by the beloved’s death and that feels that he will never recover. The speaker talks about how he feels that love doesn’t last forever and how he wants the whole world to experience the grief and sorrow he is feeling. In Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried” (pg. 433), the story follows Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and his command during the Vietnam War. Lt. Cross constantly spends most of his time fantasizing about a girl named Martha, who he has an unrequited crush. However after witnessing the death of one of his soldiers, while he was preoccupied thinking about Martha, Cross

The Things They Carried illustrates the immense costs and endless tragedies of war. Whether regarding the human or societal costs of war, the negative consequences are readily apparent. In the short story collection, Tim O’Brien uses autobiographical metafiction to depict the realities of the Vietnam War. Within the novel, Norman Bowker is a member of O’Brien’s platoon and becomes the focus of a number of O’Brien’s stories. One of these stories, “Speaking of Courage”, depicts Bowker circling a lake, years after the war.

Eventually, everyone had to deal with the weight placed on his shoulders. Some characters managed this weight better than others, such as Tim O’Brien writing war stories. Many characters who did make it out struggled to find their place back in society once they returned home. Some even ended up taking their own lives from the overwhelming load they bore. The pressure they received was insurmountable.

“War is never fair,” Colonel Read admitted (Collier and Collier 200). In the book, My Brother Sam is Dead, the authors James and Christopher Collier show that war is never fair and they are against it. They use Tim and Sam Meeker to show how it is not fair. The authors use separation of families, gruesome killings, and principle versus realities to show that they are against war. War has many effects on people and has taken many innocent lives.

Literary analysis America’s war heroes all have the same stories to tell but different tales. Prescribed with the same coloring page to fill in, and use their methods and colors to bring the image to life. This is the writing style and tactic used by Tim O’Brien in his novel, “The Things They Carried”. Steven Kaplan’s short story criticism, The Undying Certainty of the Narrator in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, provides the audience with an understanding of O’Brien’s techniques used to share “true war” stories of the Vietnam War. Kaplan explains the multitude of stories shared in each of the individual characters, narration and concepts derived from their personal experiences while serving active combat duty during the Vietnam War,