Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"

Student’s Name Professor’s Name Course Date The Things They Cary: An Analysis Introduction As troops went home to try to find purpose and remember the Vietnam War, many Americans felt lost and perplexed. Tim O’Brien’s Story presents a terrible farewell to Vietnam. Its twenty-two pieces chronicle the war as Alpha Company men experienced it (Jammes 2). The tales neither try to assign guilt nor provide any compromise. Instead, they look for solace in the storyteller’s encounters and depart with odes to what has been gone. Rather than addressing the physical reality, O’Brien focuses on discovering the emotive reality in his war stories. Instead of history, his tales examine truth through their emotional relevance. The author, Tim O’Brien, the narrator, crafts these tales to comprehend the conflict he faced. In the narrator’s view, the emotional quality of a narrative is more crucial than its historicity, so the way the story is told is vital (Womack 10). O’Brien’s stories and characters depict authenticity, absurdity, alienation, weight, memory, love, fear, and obligation themes around which O’Brien weaves a poignant tale employing symbols, providing peace in the soldier’s experience while showing the severe psychological cost of war. According to O’Brien, whether symbolic detail or hesitatingly viewed individuals, emotional truth is required to get at the core of war: the futility of the human condition and “moral ambiguity. Theme 1: Concept of Authenticity Through an existentialist lens, the primary topic of the book—shown by its name—can be seen: all objects judged as necessary were carried by the men as emblems of genuineness. For every soldier, the objects constitute the core of life; they are physical representations of identity and existence with particular meaning. Not as soldiers; these are a personal signature of authentic individuals (Berbić 25). In this sense, Mitchell Sanders’s contraception shows conviction in an approaching come back to normalcy, similar to Kiley’s humor books and Bowker’s log; First Lieutenant Cross’s love letters reflect his belief in a future, Ted Lavender’s tranquilizers reflect his trust in a peacefulness outside the sphere of fear of death. Kiowa’s New Testament is trust expressed most obviously as providence, a sense-giving agent. Though all the objects have been said to be emblematic of faith, they are nonetheless vital elements with separate connotations unconnected to faith outside the martial reality where the protagonists find themselves (Berbić 25). These men are depicted as the epitome of authenticity, and their objects reflect genuineness and are straight connections to the troops when there is no war. Theme 2: The Absurdity The war makes everyone lose the “sense of the definite” (O’Brien 52). The troops in the story are mere forms of obeying commands and behaving as per the orders; they are tools of war. For them, the definition of reality is much different from, say, ours, but also from that of a regular citizen during the war. Another feature of genuineness —the warped normal of war—confuses the warriors since it exposes the quality of being true. In all cases, when O’Brien’s protagonists demand that a story be accurate, the actual state of affairs seems pointless, or as a minimum, undergoes a paradigm of truth and falsity that has drastically changed (Berbić 51). As O’Brien points out, the only skill a soldier acquires in war is the skill of storytelling, which, typically, is, for the reader who has not experienced them, nonsensical, crazy, and often absurd, but also familiar and “normal” to a veteran (Berbić 66). Thus, the component of irrationality is present throughout O’Brien’s book. Theme 3: The Alienation As O’Brien’s book reveals, alienation can be split into two strata. The first layer is on the characters’ isolation through the war. Even among peers, hopelessness and isolation permeated all aspects of the militarized world. The characters felt human and terrified, which, in a sense, reflected alienation from humanity. Dread drives them to search for consolation and community, yet that same dread guarantees alienation if spoken. From Kiowa’s contemplation on Ted Lavender’s death, as the narrative recounts it, death also represents isolation since the story shows that the feeling was not present. He was generally happy that he wasn’t dead. The characters in the book find themselves isolated from the feeling of a noncombatant life (Berbić 53). Ted Lavender carried unweighted fear, and once he was shot and murdered, he became “dead weight” (O’Brien 4). Veteran Tim and his friends feel alienated from the civilian world and are disengaged from American culture. Their attempt to combine their combat experience with their culturally mediated knowledge emphasizes the difficulty troops had in negotiating the alienating Vietnam War milieu (Aerni 111). The pulse of alienation is felt in the themes as well as the characters of the book. Theme 4: The Burdens Alpha Company soldiers like O’Brien and Cross are confronted with psychological as well as physical consequences of combat. Their emotional inadequacy and cowardice make it hard for them to interact with individuals, which breeds self-doubt, fear, and terror. Soldiers often find that individuals cannot relate to their suffering—terror, desire to escape, and resistance to emasculating events (Young 3). Having similar experiences, the characters bear significant weight, including physical and psychological responsibilities. Alpha Company’s emasculated men battle with their positions in the war; a feeling of connection helps them negotiate their everyday responsibilities (Young 12). For men in Vietnam, shared soldiering and the accompanying responsibilities build friendships that allow them to acclimate successfully. Important men put pressure on O’Brien and Bowker, and their need to appease these needs bonded them (Young 13). Men like Bowker find it simple to give in to the weight of remaining safe and alive, which accentuates the anxiety (Young 66). These burdens overwhelm their existence and everything they do throughout the story. Theme 5: Memory The distinction between real life and fiction is hazy in O’Brien’s story. Though he has seen the war, his work mainly focuses on recollection rather than remembering specific firefights or patrols. As we see later in the story, O’Brien pens to recall and explore the recall process. Stories help us remember the conflict more accurately (Womack 10). He will always carry the memories of his military service. Though he will always remember, recalling itself will help to heal. Not only are the stories a requiem to the loss of the United States as a whole, but they are also requiem to the individual troops. These legends serve as reminders to the national conscience never to forget. They provide empathy via emotive connection rather than martial truth. The narratives include everyone. Veterans will not be the only ones charged with recalling now. They carried the burden of memories (Womack 15). This memory is one of the significant themes representing physical and emotional burdens. Theme 6:...