The Things They Carried Essays

overseas to serve for the military, he will carry many things with him. He'll carry not only his equipment, but his memories, his fears, and the weight of all of his emotions. His loves for his family and for his country are musts, and he will bring all of the memories he can with him. What soldiers carry onto the battlefield is something that many people at home rarely think about. Tim O'Brien wrote the award winning short story “The Things They Carried” to show his readers the weight that the soldiers

young  soldiers  were  emotionally  distraught  and  treated  poorly  in  their  return home,  each  with  their  own  load  to  bear.           Those in the Vietnam war had many burdens to carry, both physically and mentally. In the book The Things They Carried  some people could not handle these burdens, and others found ways to cope with them. Tim O’Brien, the author of the book , ended up finding his coping mechanism which was writing out stories. In his story he writes about not only his burdens

postmodernism questions the norm. Essentially, postmodernism use is being used because everything else has been taken, so by blending in certain creations together, you can make something new. In postmodernism, authors like Tim O’Brien, who wrote The Things They Carried and A Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, both authors are telling the reader a story in the first person with stream of conscious, just like a modernist writer would do. However, the two authors, similarly, are unreliable

Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, the chapter “Spin”, highlights how when a writer formulates their story, certain details will always be intentionally left out, and by stringing together disconnected ideas and memories, O’Brien reveals that distortion is ineluctable. Writing lies on the fundamental principal that writers have the ability to manipulate people into believing what they say by highlighting certain facts and ignoring others. “Spin” consists of numerous sentence fragments

to tragedy is the best option when trying to achieve the good life because you have to be able to risk everything in order to receive the premier form of love. First, The Things They Carried contains the main character, Jimmy Cross, falling in love with a particular woman, Martha, who does not love him back. The Things They Carried is best read as a love story rather than a war story. The

The Theme of The Things They Carried The book The Things They Carried is about the soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War. The book shares certain stories that the author had experienced or witnessed while in the war. Almost every single one of those stories was life changing in some way. The book also tells us about how all of the soldiers faced different challenges at some point in time during the war. Each one of the soldiers had their own problem or challenge to worry about. It was hard for the

People have been telling stories before we even started keeping records of them. In The Things They Carried Tim O’brien constructs many great stories. These stories have many purposes. Storytelling plays a major role in The Things They Carried. Storytelling was a kind of therapy to Tim O’brien, he used it to relieve guilt, and he used it to confess. Telling stories can help people separate tragic events and occurrences like war from themselves. “I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don’t

The things they carried,by Tim O'brien      "Oh man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker. You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like fuckin' Shredded Wheat." I chose to start off my essay with this particular exert from the book because I think that it very much represents the story in itself. Azar said this, after Tim (supposedly) killed a Vietnamese soldier with a hand grenade. It shows that in times of war, how callous men can become

The Things They Carried,” has many themes within their story. For example, one of the themes is friendship. Many friendships have been made within the platoon, and they always have their backs for each other. One of the key friendships that I noticed in the book is with Kiowa and Tim O’Brien. Kiowa is aware of the emotions and feelings of his comrades, and when he saw Tim O’Brien feeling in distress, he was there to help him. “Then he said, ‘Man, I’m sorry.’ Then later he said, ‘Why not talk about

O’Brien’s short story The Things They Carried. War is a common theme used in tragedy, considering the enormous toll it takes on those affected. O’Brien says, "they carried like freight trains; they carried it on their backs and shoulders.” He describes the weight of what the soldiers carry with them, literally and figuratively. Five pound steel helmets do not weigh as much as the sight of seeing a man die (O’Brien, 344-359). In class, we did a free write about The Things They Carried and talked about what