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The Things They Carried Thesis Statements and Essay Topics

Below you will find four outstanding thesis statements / paper topics for “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brian can be used as essay starters. All four incorporate at least one of the themes found in “The Things They Carried” and are broad enough so that it will be easy to find textual support, yet narrow enough to provide a focused clear thesis statement. These thesis statements offer a short summary of “The Things They Carried” in terms of different elements that could be important in an essay. You are, of course, free to add your own analysis and understanding of the plot or themes to them. Using the essay topics below in conjunction with the list of  important quotes from “The Things They Carried”  on our quotes page, you should have no trouble connecting with the text and writing an excellent essay.

Topic #1: The things they carried

There is a list given for each soldier of the items he carried. Some of the items can be physically touched. Other items can only be felt or described. For each soldier, the items and emotions he carries are significant. Describe how the choice of items relates to each character. Include arguments where applicable about how the items affect others and each soldier’s survival. Determine which items hold the most value.

 Topic #2: Kiowa

Kiowa is one of the many soldiers who is killed. His death is described in three of the stories. Explore the reasons why Kiowa’s death stands out to so many of the other soldiers. Why is it that so many of them claim responsibility and guilt for his loss of life? Illustrate what actions could have been taken to avoid Kiowa’s death and the guilt on the minds of so many soldiers.

Topic #3: Common themes

Although the stories are written and compiled by O’Brien and are labeled as fiction, O’Brien draws on his own experiences during the Vietnam War and the experiences of others. Many of the stories share common themes such as love, loss, regret of things left behind and left undone, violence, and dissatisfaction. The soldiers that survive come home severely changed by their experiences. Trace a common thread throughout the stories and relay how it is significant.

Topic #4: Controversy surrounding the Vietnam War

There was much controversy surrounding the Vietnam War. Soldiers were sent to kill the bad guys, only to learn that they were often firing on women and children. Throughout the stories, the soldiers reveal how disillusioned they became during and after the time they spent fighting. Choose one or two of the stories and examine the disillusionment that is described. What elements and events contribute to this disappointment in the military and the United States.

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Home › Literature › Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 26, 2021

In the short story cycle The Things They Carried (1990), Tim O’Brien cemented his reputation as one of the most powerful chroniclers of the Vietnam War, joining the conversation alongside Philip Caputo ( A Rumor of War ), Michael Herr ( Dispatches ), David Halberstam ( The Best and the Brightest ), and the poet Bruce Weigl ( Song of Napalm ), among others. Comprising 22 pieces—some little more than vignettes, others more “traditional” stories—the collection details the experiences of the soldier Tim O’Brien, who returns to his native Minnesota after a tour of duty in Vietnam. In his subsequent role as author, O’Brien records his recollections in a false memoir of sorts as a way of reconstructing the war’s elusive “truth.” O’Brien’s goal in The Things They Carried, he tells Michael Coffey, “was to write something utterly convincing but without any rules as to what’s real and what’s made up. I forced myself to try to invent a new form. I had never invented form before” (60).

“In the Field” follows Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and his platoon of 17 remaining men as they search a Vietnamese muck field for Kiowa, a lost comrade. Cross, who figures prominently in several of the book’s pieces—including the eponymous “The Things They Carried,” the collection’s most anthologized story—feels tremendous guilt over Kiowa’s death, not the least because the previous evening, just before an ambush, Cross refused to disobey orders and to move his men to higher, and therefore safer, ground. Kiowa, buried when a fellow soldier inadvertently gave away the platoon’s position to the enemy, was a popular soldier. Out of respect for their fallen comrade, the men dutifully wade through waist-deep sewage searching for his remains; they sustain themselves with a morbid sense of humor, making light of the situation in order to quell their fear of random, sudden death at the hands of a faceless enemy. Cross quickly realizes that he is ill suited for the military, having been shipped to Vietnam after joining the officer training corps in college only to be with friends and to collect a few college credits. “[Cross] did not care one way or the other about the war,” O’Brien intones, “and he had no desire to command, and even after all these months in the bush, all the days and nights, even then he did not know enough to keep his men out of a shit field” (168).

Tim O’Brien/The Austin Chronicle

War is a great leveler in O’Brien’s fiction. In the field where Cross and his men search for Kiowa, “The filth seemed to erase identities, transforming the men into identical copies of a single soldier, which was exactly how Jimmy Cross had been trained to treat them, as interchangeable units of command” (163). The young lieutenant, however, suspends his humanity only with great difficulty. Ruminating on Kiowa’s death, he imagines writing a letter to the soldier’s father before deciding that “no apologies were necessary, because in fact it was one of those freak things, and the war was full of freaks, and nothing could ever change it anyway” (176). Cross’s rationalization may absolve him (at least in part) of his guilt over Kiowa’s death, though it is also a tacit admission of his lack of control over the war’s daily life-and-death struggles. Cross’s desire to organize the details of Kiowa’s death in his own mind is an extension of O’Brien’s attempt in The Things They Carried to construct a coherent narrative that finds the essential truth of war (a notion that the author confirms in the ironically titled “How to Tell a True War Story” which acts as an interpretive key to his recollections).

Upon the discovery of Kiowa’s body, the men properly mourn the loss of their fellow soldier, though “they also felt a kind of giddiness, a secret joy, because they were alive, and because even the rain was preferable to being sucked under a shit field, and because it was all a matter of luck and happenstance” (175). Cross, yearning for war’s end, imagines himself on a golf course in his New Jersey hometown, free of the burden of leading men to their deaths. O’Brien examines the onus of responsibility often, and in the related story “Field Trip,” which details the author’s return to Vietnam two decades later to the field where Kiowa died, O’Brien finds a world barely recognizable as the one he left behind. “The field remains, but in a form much different from what O’Brien remembers, smaller now, and full of light,” Patrick A. Smith writes of O’Brien’s visit. “The air is soundless, the ghosts are missing, and the farmers who now tend the field go back to work after stealing a curious glance in his direction. The war is absent, except in O’Brien’s memory” (107). But it is memory, O’Brien makes clear, that supersedes experience and haunts soldiers long after the shooting has stopped.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Coffey, Michael. “Tim O’Brien: Inventing a New Form Helps the Author Talk about War, Memory, and Storytelling.” Publishers Weekly, 16 February 1990, pp. 60–61. O’Brien, Tim. “In the Field.” In The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Smith, Patrick A. Tim O’Brien: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005.

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The Things They Carried - Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” delves into the multifaceted experiences of soldiers during the Vietnam War, blurring the line between fiction and reality. Essays could explore the narrative structure of the collection, its metafictional elements, and the exploration of truth, memory, and storytelling. The discussions might extend to the examination of the physical and emotional burdens carried by the soldiers, and how these tangible and intangible weights reflect the broader societal and moral dilemmas of war. Additionally, essays could delve into the character dynamics, the portrayal of camaraderie, fear, and the coping mechanisms employed by the soldiers in the face of trauma and death. The discourse might also touch upon the broader themes of war, loss, and the human capacity for resilience and redemption as explored through the narrative. Furthermore, discussions might extend to the impact of “The Things They Carried” on the war literature genre, its contribution to the discourse on the Vietnam War, and its enduring relevance in understanding the complexities of war, memory, and the human experience. We have collected a large number of free essay examples about The Things They Carried you can find at PapersOwl Website. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

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The Things they Carried Literary Essay

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Essay About The Things They Carried Contradictions are a natural part of everyday life, simple ones, and complicated contradictions, and it is normal to find them in our lives, and in novels. The author in the story, The Things They Carried, uses contradictions to explain how he is feeling throughout the war without directly saying it. These contradictions show the hidden messages that Tim O’Brien is trying to get across to the reader. These hidden messages are what help to create his story and give it a deeper meaning. Each one of these messages contributes greatly and helps to emphasize the overall theme of the story, which is that each person carries something with the whether we can see it or not. Some of these things that we carry with us are what can drag us down without anyone even knowing it. In the story “The Things They Carried” the author, Tim O’Brien sends his secret messages through the contradictions that he shares inside of each of his war stories. One of the contradictions that O’Brien uses in the story is how people like to believe that the reason behind a war is because people are fighting for what they believe in, but in reality, there is not much reason, and people do not even volunteer to do it. This is shown through all of the things that the soldiers carry throughout the war. “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.” (O’Brien, 23). This quote explains the trauma, stress, and guilt that the soldiers go through within the war. Each tangible and intangible item adds weight to the soldiers and makes the war even harder for them to get through. The reason for fighting in the war is lost as they can’t even remember what they believe in once they hear the first gunshot. O’Brien uses a contradiction, to show how “strong” many people may think that the soldiers in the war are, and how strong the war will make them. O’Brien tries to show how people think of how strong they are, and how no one is thinking of the simple fact that they are human. It is human instinct to talk about their problems instead of bottling them up inside. O’Brien shows how soldiers, like any normal human, need to express their feelings, or it can end up badly, and he shows this contradiction through Norman Bowker. In the story, Speaking of Courage, it states, “And then he would have talked about the medal he did not win and why he did not win it.” (O’Brien 135). Norman Bowker was begging anyone to talk to him, to listen to every problem that he had inside of him, and to tell how he lost his very best friend as he was actually trying to save him, but unfortunately, he could not find someone soon enough. This also shows how the war did not make Norman Bowker stronger, like some may think it would, but in fact, it broke him down completely, and that in itself is a contradiction. Another contradiction that he uses is how he tries to create the theme of a true war story all while making up each of the war stories. One of the stories he wrote titled “The Man I Killed” shows this as it talks about a man who has felt guilty for killing a man during the war. The story states, “Listen to me,' Kiowa said. 'You feel terrible, I know that.' Then he said, 'Okay, maybe I don't know.' (O’Brien 121). As shown in this quote and in this particular story, it seems as if O’Brien is trying to make the reader feel what the character is feeling. This is a contradiction because Tim O’Brien is using this made-up character to express his own true feelings through a story, about a fake character. He portrays this story as if he wants the readers to believe that the stories are actually true. O’Brien did not actually kill anyone, but yet he still felt guilty for all of the other people who died and for the families that were losing someone that they loved. For these reasons, he tried to make the readers feel what he was feeling, which perhaps is why although the story is not true, it truly is a true war story, because the feeling, to him, was all too real. Overall, in The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien uses different forms of contradictions, in order to make the reader feel exactly how he felt during the war, to let them temporarily put the weight that was on him onto the person reading his novel. Through the made-up/fictional characters and stories, he gave the reader the feeling of how war really is, and not how it is portrayed in movies and other novels, he gave the readers a one time experience of a true war story and helped the readers to understand that not all things are as they seem. 

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Ransom Center Magazine

The textual “truth” behind Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

June 20, 2017 - John Young

Tim O’Brien’s  The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The book depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer. The Harry Ransom Center holds the author’s archive .

Two of the most poignant stories in The Things They Carried are “On the Rainy River” and “Field Trip.” “Rainy River” portrays a young O’Brien, weeks removed from his college graduation, leaving his home in Worthington, Minnesota, for a fishing outpost on the Canadian border, agonizing over whether to report for Army induction or to live as a draft dodger. In “Field Trip,” O’Brien returns to Vietnam many years after his tour of duty as a foot soldier and radio operator, now with his ten-year-old daughter, Kathleen, as he seeks some measure of peace from the traumatic memories of a close comrade’s death. Because these stories are removed from the daily realities of the war, they tend to be more accessible to O’Brien’s audience. But in the original version of Things , readers would have turned the page to discover that neither of these stories is “true.”

Throughout The Things They Carried , O’Brien famously distinguishes between “happening-truth,” or an accurate and verifiable account of historical events, and “story truth,” or readers’ genuine experience of the story, even if the details are invented. The book blurs the lines between fiction and truth even further in its dedication to a group of soldiers who turn out to be fictional characters throughout the rest of the book, and in the appearance of “Tim O’Brien” in several stories, a figure who seems very similar to, but not quite identical with, the author. Many readers, and most of my students over many years of teaching the book, take the circumstances of “Rainy River” and “Field Trip” to be at least more or less true (in the conventional sense): they assume that O’Brien made some sort of trip away from his family while deciding whether to honor his draft notice, even if not precisely the one portrayed here, and that O’Brien and his daughter went back to Vietnam years after the war, even if, again, the “real” version of that event differs from its fictional representation. (That is, they take these stories to be relatively conventional instances of fiction based on episodes from the author’s life, even if contained within a much more complex metafictional narrative.)

In fact, while O’Brien did agonize about serving in a war he vehemently opposed, he never made any trip like the one in “Rainy River;” his worries played out entirely in Worthington. And, while O’Brien did return to Vietnam in 1994, accompanied by his then girlfriend—this trip is the subject of his well-known piece for The New York Times Magazine , “The Vietnam in Me”—his daughter did not go with him, because he had no children. In the typescript for the book that O’Brien sent to Houghton Mifflin, the chapter titled “Good Form,” which discusses O’Brien’s interactions with the (ostensibly real) veteran Norman Bowker, also included a long passage disavowing any happening-truth in “Rainy River” or “Field Trip,” or in various other events in the book, such as O’Brien’s empathetic imagination of the Vietnamese life he has ended by shooting an enemy soldier on patrol, or a postwar visit from his former company commander, Jimmy Cross. Here is a portion of that early version (I have retained the cross-throughs as they appear in the copy at the Harry Ransom Center):

I don’t have a daughter named Kathleen. I don’t have a daughter. I don’t have children. To my knowledge, at least, I never killed anyone. Jimmy Cross never visited me at my house in Massachusetts, because of course Jimmy Cross does not exist in the world of objects, and never did. He’s purely invented, like Martha, and like Kiowa or Mitchell Sanders and all the others. I never ran way to the Rainy River. I wanted to—badly—but I didn’t .

I came across this typescript during a month-long fellowship at the Ransom Center, poring through as many of O’Brien’s papers as I could, and have written about it more extensively in How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O’Brien’s Process of Textual Production (University of Iowa Press, 2017). Ever since my first encounter with this aspect of O’Brien’s papers, I have been fascinated by the question of how readers would interact differently with the book if passages like this one (and another deleted chapter, “The Real Mary Anne,” which takes the opposite tack of insisting that the heroine of “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” was, against the odds, an actual person) had been retained. Or, to put that counterfactual question another way: how might O’Brien’s real readers have responded to the version(s) of The Things They Carried that could have been published, but weren’t? We can start to think through those questions by looking back further than the typescript, to the magazine versions of several chapters that appeared before the book.

O’Brien’s Magazine Readers

While the relationship between fiction and truth is questioned elsewhere in The Things They Carried for readers to at least reasonably doubt the veracity of stories like “Rainy River” and “Field Trip,” some of O’Brien’s original readers would have had no such contextual cues, as they found these stories in magazines. “Rainy River” appeared first in two periodicals: Macalester Today , O’Brien’s college alumni magazine, and Playboy , which paid $5,000, the largest magazine check of O’Brien’s career to that point. Macalester Today heightens the sense of autobiographical reality with its subheading, “A writer remembers the summer of 1968, when he found himself in desperate trouble. A month after graduating from Macalester, he was drafted to serve in Vietnam.” But O’Brien’s own introduction to the story immediately undercuts this impression, as he explains his choice to use a character who shares his name but is otherwise “almost entirely invented”: “Personally, I can’t see that it matters in the least—what counts is the artifact, the work itself—but nonetheless, with this book in particular, people seem interested in knowing what’s ‘real’ and what isn’t. As with all fiction, the answer is simple: if you believe it, it’s real; if you don’t, it isn’t.” O’Brien here deftly sidesteps the question of what’s “real,” at least as most of his readers would understand it, or why they might be especially concerned about such issues with this book, for an answer that bleeds into his more developed sense of “story truth” in the book. But given the context of an alumni magazine, we might easily assume readers who are at least relatively predisposed to take the events in “Rainy River” as closer to “real” than they are, based not only on the question of whether they “believe it,” but also on the types of stories one expects to find in this venue.

“Field Trip” appeared in the August 1990 issue of McCall’s , part of the magazine’s “Summer Fiction Special,” with a readership presumably attuned to the father-daughter relationship as much as the memories of wartime trauma. Indeed, the pull quote on the story’s first page highlights O’Brien’s supposed daughter as if she were the story’s central consciousness: “Kathleen was only ten, but her father wanted her to understand Vietnam, the place where he’d lost so much, and to witness what it was he’d find there.” McCall’s readers, had they encountered a version of the book with the passage above from “Good Form” intact, might have been especially surprised, even dismayed, to discover Kathleen’s fictionality. Of course, that’s often the point in The Things They Carried , as in the famous ending of “How to Tell a True War Story,” when the reader learns that the savage killing of a baby water buffalo was an overtly fictional episode. Identifying with O’Brien as a father, and/or with his young daughter’s attempt to make sense of a war she doesn’t understand, only to have the fictional rug pulled out, seems on its surface like the same kind of effect that the book goes to considerable lengths to create in its other chapters.

So, why did O’Brien remove these elements of The Things They Carried ? That is, why did he render the narrative less overtly metafictional, and how does this revision impact readers of the editions actually published? Part of the answer is that O’Brien’s editor at Houghton Mifflin, Camille Hykes, felt the collection would be stronger without its tricks exposed quite so much. “Why should the magician pull up his sleeve & tell us—Look, this is where the birds come from—when really, deep down, we knew it anyway?” she wrote to O’Brien. And O’Brien himself clearly decided this version of the book would more subtly, and more effectively, generate its metafictional effects.

But I’m not so sure. Much of the real power of The Things They Carried , for me, comes precisely from the process of building emotional investments in its characters, and then rebuilding those relationships on different terms once we have been told, in no uncertain terms, that the “people” we have come to care about don’t “exist in the world of objects.” We probably knew it all along, as Hykes suggests, but the best magic tricks, after all, are the ones where you know it’s an illusion but still can’t quite figure out what’s really “true.”

John K. Young is a professor of English at Marshall University and author of Black Writers, White Publishers (2006); Publishing Blackness , co-edited with George Hutchinson (2013), and How to Revise a True War Story (2017). His fellowship at the Ransom Center was supported by the Norman Mailer Endowed Fund.

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The Things They Carried Theme Essay

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English Studies

This website is dedicated to English Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, English Language and its teaching and learning.

“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien: Analysis

Published in 1990, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien is a semi-autobiographical novel that draws on the author’s experiences in the Vietnam War.

Introduction: “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien

Table of Contents

Published in 1990, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien is a semi-autobiographical novel that draws on the author’s experiences in the Vietnam War. The story follows a platoon of American soldiers grappling with the physical and emotional challenges of war. Through evocative descriptions of the soldiers’ gear and internal struggles, O’Brien crafts a haunting and introspective narrative that delves into the complexities of human nature under duress. Hailed as a classic of contemporary American literature, “The Things They Carried” is lauded for its poignant portrayal of war’s human cost and its innovative blurring of factual and fictional elements.

Main Events in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien

• Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and his platoon carry various physical and emotional burdens as they navigate the realities of war in Vietnam.
• Cross obsesses over his unrequited love for Martha, a college student back home, and realizes he needs to focus on his duties as a leader.
• The platoon comes under enemy fire and suffers casualties, including Ted Lavender, a young soldier who had been heavily medicated to cope with the stress of war.
• The platoon burns down a village and kills a water buffalo, further revealing the moral ambiguity and psychological toll of war.
• O’Brien introduces the concept of “story truth,” exploring the role of memory and imagination in shaping individual and collective experiences of war.
• Kiowa, one of Cross’s closest companions, is killed in action, and the soldiers are forced to grapple with the fragility of life and the weight of loss.
• O’Brien reflects on the power of storytelling to convey emotional truths and provide a sense of catharsis for those who have experienced trauma.
• The soldiers participate in a night patrol and encounter a young Vietnamese soldier, further highlighting the complexities and human costs of war.
• The platoon is sent on a mission to retrieve the body of a soldier who has been killed, prompting reflections on the value and meaning of sacrifice.
• The story ends with Cross burning the letters and photographs he had carried with him, symbolizing his commitment to moving on and living in the present.

Literary Devices in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien

• Allusion : A reference to a well-known person, place, event, or literary work. Example: The title “The Things They Carried” alludes to the physical and emotional burdens borne by soldiers, resonating with the broader literary theme of characters facing hardship.
• Ambiguity : The presence of multiple meanings or interpretations within a text. Example: Whether the killing of the baby water buffalo was an act of cruelty or mercy is left ambiguous, highlighting the moral complexities of war.
• Foreshadowing : A hint or clue about what will happen later in the story. Example: Ted Lavender’s unnecessary death, so early in the narrative, subtly foreshadows the tragedies awaiting other members of the platoon.
• Hyperbole : An exaggeration used for emphasis or effect. Example: Describing the soldiers’ load as “humping…at least 20 pounds” doesn’t refer to literal weight but conveys the overwhelming burdens they bear.
• Imagery : Descriptive language that appeals to the senses, creating a vivid mental picture. Example: O’Brien’s evocative details of the Vietnamese landscape (“sun-filled paddies…tall, swaying grass”) transport the reader into the soldiers’ environment.
• Irony : A situation that is the opposite of what is expected, often for humorous or poignant effect. Example: Jimmy Cross’s preoccupation with his unrequited love for Martha ironically distracts him from the deadly serious reality of leading his men.
• Metaphor : A comparison between two things without using “like” or “as.” Example: O’Brien compares the emotional weight the soldiers carry to literal objects like “clamshells on their backs.”
• Motif : A recurring element or image that contributes to the overall theme. Example: The recurring descriptions of the physical things the soldiers carry highlight the theme of how war’s burdens extend far beyond mere equipment.
• Onomatopoeia : The use of words that sound like what they describe. Example: O’Brien uses “whoosh” and “whap” to mimic the sounds of gunfire, bringing the reader closer to the battlefield experience.
• Personification : Giving human qualities to non-human things. Example: O’Brien refers to the land itself as “the enemy,” making war an overwhelming, inescapable force.
• Repetition : Repeating a word, phrase, or sentence for emphasis. Example: The repetitive listing of everything the soldiers carry emphasizes the overwhelming nature of their combined physical and emotional burdens.
• Simile : A comparison using “like” or “as.” Example: The soldiers’ movement through a field is likened to “the wind against wheat,” highlighting their vulnerability.
• Symbolism : The use of objects, images, or actions to represent abstract ideas. Example: The young Vietnamese soldier killed on the trail symbolizes the human cost of war on both sides of the conflict.
• Tone : The author’s attitude towards the subject matter. Example: O’Brien’s tone shifts between wistful, melancholy, and starkly realistic, mirroring the soldiers’ emotional experiences.
• Verisimilitude : The appearance of being true or real. Example: O’Brien’s blending of actual events with invented stories creates a sense of verisimilitude, making the emotional impact of the narrative even more powerful.

Characterization in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien

Absolutely! Here’s a characterization analysis for some of the key figures in “The Things They Carried,” along with specific supporting references from the story:

Lieutenant Jimmy Cross

• Conflict: Torn between his duty as a leader and his obsessive love for Martha, a girl back home who represents an idealized escape (“letters were full of love” – ‘Love’).
• Motivation: Desperately seeks a sense of normalcy and control amidst the chaos of war, clinging to the illusion of Martha as a lifeline.
• Evolution: The death of Ted Lavender forces him to confront his misplaced priorities (“He hated himself” – ‘Love’). His burning of Martha’s letters symbolizes a shift towards commitment to the present and his responsibility to his men.

Tim O’Brien (the narrator)

• Meta-character: O’Brien blurs the lines between the author and a fictionalized version of himself within the narrative.
• Role: Serves as both a participant in the events and a reflective storyteller examining the nature of memory and truth (“And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story…” – ‘Good Form’).
• Motivation: Seeks to process his own war trauma through storytelling, exploring the emotional truths often obscured in factual accounts.
• Morality and Compassion: Represents a grounding force of decency amidst war’s dehumanizing effects. (“Kiowa, who was a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament…” – ‘The Things They Carried’).
• Symbolic Death: His sinking into the ‘muck’ after a mortar attack exemplifies the senseless loss of innocence in war.
• Impact: Kiowa’s death leaves a void in the platoon, symbolizing the erosion of compassion and morality necessary for survival in conflict.

Norman Bowker

• Invisible Wounds: Embodies the lingering psychological trauma of war even after returning home. His lack of tangible injuries underscores this. (“…the ache in his heart was worse than any belly wound” – ‘Speaking of Courage’).
• Cyclic Narrative: His story, told in ‘Speaking of Courage’, highlights the suffocating impact of unprocessed trauma.
• Symbolism: His eventual suicide tragically emphasizes what can happen when the ‘weight’ of memory and experience becomes unbearable.
• Medic’s Perspective: Rat offers a glimpse into the physical and emotional toll of treating horrific injuries (“…Rat Kiley was crying” – ‘Friends’).
• Dark Humor: His tendency towards exaggeration and grim jokes serves as a coping mechanism for the relentless suffering he witnesses.
• Breaking Point: The shooting of his own foot, while self-inflicted, signifies the psychological breaking point a medic can reach in the war’s intensity.

Additional Notes:

• Nuance: O’Brien depicts his characters with complexity; no one is purely “good” or “bad.” They are humanized by their flaws and moments of vulnerability.
• The Power of What’s Carried: Each soldier’s physical and emotional burdens define their experiences. These burdens are often unique, leading to both camaraderie and a sense of isolation.

Major Themes in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien

Writing Style in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien

• Blurring Fact and Fiction: O’Brien merges personal experiences with invented elements, challenging the notion of absolute truth in war narratives. This creates his unique notion of “story-truth” ( ‘How to Tell a True War Story’).
• Visceral and Introspective: O’Brien combines vivid descriptions of the war’s physical realities with reflections on soldiers’ inner emotional turmoil, creating a deeply affecting portrayal of their experiences.
• Repetition: Repeated phrases and descriptions, like the listing of the things the soldiers carry, emphasize both the physical weight and the psychological toll of war.
• Imagery: O’Brien’s powerful sensory descriptions bring the Vietnamese landscape, the soldiers’ equipment, and moments of violence to life, immersing the reader in the story’s world.
• Metaphor and Symbolism: Comparisons like intangible burdens to “humps” and “clamshells” ( ‘The Things They Carried’) deepen the portrayal of the soldiers’ emotional weight. Objects like Kiowa’s New Testament symbolize hope and faith amidst despair.
• Honesty and Authenticity: Despite his fictionalizations, O’Brien aims to convey the emotional core of war’s impact, admitting the impossibility of a purely objective account (‘Good Form’).

Literary Theories and Interpretation of “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien

Questions and Thesis Statements about “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien

Question 1: How does O’Brien’s blurring of fact and fiction impact the reader’s understanding of war and its emotional consequences?

• Thesis Statement: In “The Things They Carried,” O’Brien’s blending of personal experience with invented elements destabilizes traditional war narratives, emphasizing the subjective nature of memory and highlighting the emotional resonance of “story-truth” over factual accounts.

Question 2: How does the motif of physical burdens symbolize the psychological toll of war in “The Things They Carried”?

• Thesis Statement: O’Brien’s detailed catalogs of the soldiers’ equipment evolve into powerful metaphors for intangible burdens like fear, grief, and guilt, demonstrating the interwoven nature of physical and psychological hardship faced by soldiers in combat.

Question 3: In what ways does O’Brien challenge traditional notions of heroism in his portrayal of the soldiers in “The Things They Carried”?

• Thesis Statement: “The Things They Carried” subverts conventional depictions of battlefield valor by emphasizing the quiet courage of endurance, the moral complexities of survival, and the vulnerability hidden within the facade of stoic soldiers.

Question 4: How does “The Things They Carried” function as a form of trauma narrative, and what does it reveal about the lasting psychological impact of war?

• Thesis Statement: Through fragmented narratives, metafictional reflections, and depictions of the soldiers’ coping mechanisms, “The Things They Carried” reveals the profound and often unresolved legacy of trauma carried by those who have experienced the horrors of war.

Question 5: To what extent does O’Brien’s portrayal of the Vietnamese people and culture in “The Things They Carried” perpetuate or challenge colonialist perspectives?

• Thesis Statement: “The Things They Carried” offers a limited and often stereotyped view of the Vietnamese experience. A postcolonial analysis examines how this portrayal reinforces or subverts power dynamics and contributes to the otherizing of the Vietnamese people in the American war narrative.

Short Question-Answer “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien

Suggested Readings: “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien

Scholarly articles.

• Bar-Yosef, Eitan. “War and Truth: ‘The Things They Carried’ from the Postmodern/Trauma Perspective.” Style , vol. 35, no. 4, 2001, pp. 645-664.
• Briggum, Sue, et al. “‘You’d Have to Carry a List’: Tim O’Brien and the Vietnam War Story.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal , vol. 46, no. 4, 2013, pp. 147-62.
• Heberle, Mark A. A Trauma Artist: Tim O’Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam . University of Iowa Press,‌ 2001.
• Calloway, Catherine. Tim O’Brien and the Vietnam War: Rewriting the World . Twayne, 1996.
• McDaniel, Tim. The Limits of a Vietnam War Literature: Stories by Tim O’Brien . Susquehanna University Press, 1996.
• Searle, William. Tim O’Brien . Twayne Publishers, 1991.
• SparkNotes: “The Things They Carried” Summary & Analysis. [invalid URL removed]
• LitCharts: “The Things They Carried” https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-things-they-carried
• The Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University: Tim O’Brien collection (includes manuscript drafts, letters, and other archival materials relating to the author and his work). [invalid URL removed]

Related posts:

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• “The Use of Force” by William Carlos Williams
• “Battle Royal” by Ralph Ellison
• “A Small, Good Thing” by Raymond Carver

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The Things They Carried

Tim o’brien, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Mortality and Death

The threat, even expectation, of death hangs over all of the soldiers in The Things They Carried . Even before he reaches Vietnam, Tim O'Brien (both the author of the collection and the frequent first person narrator) meditates on the inevitability of his death after he is drafted in "On The Rainy River," and considers dodging the draft and fleeing to Canada. The collection is haunted by the deaths of O'Brien's comrades—Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon…

Social Obligation

In The Things They Carried , O'Brien often focuses on how the men in his stories, even if they volunteered to fight, joined the army because of the unspoken pressure to fulfill their obligations as citizens and soldiers. These social obligations range from that of wider society (government, city/town) and narrows to the nuclear (family, friends, personal reflection). After being drafted in "On the Rainy River," Tim O'Brien runs from his hometown and ends up…

Within the stories in The Things They Carried the characters tell many stories to each other, and the question always asked of the storyteller is "What's the moral?" In "How to Tell a True War Story," Mitchell Sanders tells O'Brien about a company who has to lie dormant and watchful in the pitch-blackness over a village. They begin to have auditory hallucinations: champagne glasses clinking, music playing, a full chamber orchestra. They aren't supposed to…

Storytelling and Memory

Storytelling in The Things They Carried operates on multiple levels: at the level of the book itself, the stories within stories, and the reflections on the value of these stories both in the context of the war and then post-war. "The Lives of the Dead" speaks to O'Brien's belief that stories have the power to give an entire life to those who have passed on. He refers to his childhood love Linda who passed away…

Shame and Guilt

Shame and guilt are constant and often inextricable themes in The Things They Carried . Soldiers felt obligated to go to war for fear of embarrassing themselves, their families, and their towns if they fled. This embarrassment is bolstered by the guilt of not being "masculine" enough—not being brave, heroic, and patriotic enough. O'Brien reflects on how he thought he had a secret reserve of bravery and heroism stored away, waiting for the moment when…

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried Critical Analysis Essay

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The story starts innocently, informing the reader what the soldier got from Vietnam. Tim O’Brien’s narrative of his experience in Vietnam is a composite of many people’s stories. Death, life, joy, and harrowing situations are all part of his path. The Things They Carried is an extraordinarily comprehensive and graphic account of the Vietnam War that paints startlingly realistic imagery of the conflict. O’Brien describes each platoon member’s emblems, talismans, and totems for varied reasons. He also takes the audience through his friends’ numerous deep and diverse experiences and emotions. The Things They Carried title are literal and symbolic, implying that they carried physical goods and emotional luggage. Therefore, this paper aims to critically analyze Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried in a literary and figurative sense.

O’Brien describes some of the actual items they carried at the start of the book: This comprised anything from their girlfriend’s pantyhose to survival kit and weaponry like pistols and explosives. In their current circumstances, they utilize weapons to protect their physical bodies. Still, they also carried totems representing homes, such as comic books, the New Testament, and a rabbit’s foot, representing their past and hope for their future. Dysentery, malaria, rots, and molds were among the other factors linked to the location. Some troops packed supplies that might give them an advantage in war, while others carried comfort items such as wine and confectionery. The author mentions one soldier (Norman Bowker) who held a thumb but was “ otherwise a gentle person .” This statement stood out because the author notes that he is gentle. The thumb appears to symbolize how many of the militaries have got estranged from their humanity.

The caption The Things They Carried was both literal and symbolic. Some troops brought items into Vietnam, while others gathered them. Kiowa, an indigenous soldier, brought “his grandmother’s suspicion of the white man” into the conflict. After being enlisted, O’Brien carries extreme anxiety into the fight. He describes his experience of running away before joining Vietnam. Still, he discovers himself via interactions with other individuals and concludes that serving is the right thing to do. All of the troops had a lot of emotional baggage and had been through a lot of suffering.

Besides, the fighters all had to perform awful things during the conflict and witness terrible things. The fighters had to witness their friends, the individuals they had grown to love and care about after going through this horrific experience with them, get shot and killed right in front of their eyes. The fighters had to bear the grief of losing their friends and the anxiety that they may be next: they had to carry their rage from being recruited into a war they did not want to fight in the first place, as well as profound homesickness. They had to bear the guilt of killing other people’s lives as well as the incapacity to grieve their grief adequately.

The scenes with the infant water buffalo and the dog are examples of this incapacity to absorb grief. The author presents two stories throughout the book, one of which is far more brutal and violent than the other. In the dog’s narrative, the dog got injured in a perverted effort at entertainment. This anecdote exemplified how troops grew to lose respect for life due to the frequency they witnessed death. One of the most upsetting stories was that of the infant water buffalo. It recounted the newborn buffalo’s prolonged, violent, and brutal demise, which not only displayed great sadness but also represented how their humanity was gradually getting eroded. The author expresses his view of death as beautiful, implying that the troops begin to lose value for life due to all of the killings they have witnessed and perpetrated.

In O’Brien’s narrative, war acts as a tremendous stabilizing agent. Cross and his soldiers are looking for Kiowa in the field, “The filth seemed to erase identities, transforming the men into identical copies of a single soldier, which was exactly how Jimmy Cross had been trained to treat them, as interchangeable units of command” (163). O’Brien describes the stories they brought as other anecdotes from home to keep them going and some tales they picked up along the route. They even made up stories to help them deal with and transport the dead, sometimes wholly fictitious. It was one of the methods the guys devised to help them process their sorrow and make sense of the tragedy all around them while also celebrating their camaraderie and forming a type of family. One unhealthy coping technique the guys discovered was modifying how they referred to the remains of their fallen unit mates. Instead of bodies, they get denoted as trash . It briefly alleviated the sorrow of knowing that the deceased corpse was only a few hours earlier battling by their side and a family member.

The author posited that males also had a subjective view of truth. According to the author, the truth of a war narrative is never as easy as someone stepping in and saving all of their colleagues; actual combat stories are considerably more nuanced. The author tells battle anecdotes from his point of view of what happened during his service in Vietnam. Rather than heroics, the stories focus on the compassion and honesty of the event. His point of view resulted in a less heroic image of war and a better awareness of the complexity that our military personnel face. Patrick A. Smith describes O’Brien’s arrival, “The air is soundless, the ghosts are missing, and the farmers who now tend the field go back to work after stealing a curious glance in his direction. The war is absent, except in O’Brien’s memory” (107). But, as O’Brien points out, memory trumps experience and haunts troops long after the gunfire has ceased.

Therefore, The Things They Carried is an extraordinarily comprehensive and graphic account of the Vietnam War that paints startlingly realistic imagery of the conflict. He pondered other options but finally chose to fight in Vietnam. The story is mainly about O’Brien’s experience during the war in Vietnam as he joined the war as a young man but left as a guilty older man. The Things They Carried included both tangible goods and complicated emotions. Death, wrath, sadness, sickness, grief, remorse, humiliation, fear, agony, and a slew of other emotions must be endearing to the man. They had to see the deaths of their friends and colleagues, and they even had to retrieve their remains to be taken home afterward. The author described the story from his point of view, telling the truth. Rather than praising their experiences, his approach humanized the reality of combat via both the literal and tangible items they carried.

Works Cited

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried . 4th Estate, 2019.

Smith, Patrick A. Tim O’Brien: A Critical Companion . Greenwood Press, 2005.

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IvyPanda . "Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried Critical Analysis." November 21, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/tim-obriens-the-things-they-carried-critical-analysis/.