introduction for the things they carried essay

“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien Essay

Introduction, war as the central theme of “the things they carried”, works cited.

The main theme of “The Things They Carried” by O’Brien is the events that were happening during the Vietnam War. The war does not revolve around things such as heroism or tactics. It is characterized by boredom and terrific moments. Apart from that, it is a backdrop that defines the force against the lives of the soldiers.

O’Brien emphasizes the fact that it is not easy to generalize what is entailed in war. The short story addresses different themes, but war is among its central topics. Tim O’Brien is among the characters that play essential roles in the story. There is a close connection between OBrien and the theme of war. This essay will discuss the relationship between O’Brien as a character and the war as the central theme of “The Things They Carried.”

O’Brien focuses on telling war stories. TTTC is a work of fiction. Throughout the story, there is an interplay between fact and fiction.

O’Brien tells the story authoritatively because he was there during the actual war. That is the connection between O’Brien’s biography and the story’s central theme that was mentioned in the above paragraph of the essay. The examples of it in “The Things They Carried” are numerous. Regarding the Vietnam War, no one can tell the story better than a person like O’Brien, who witnessed the action. Assuming a position of authority, O’Brien goes ahead to define the parameters characteristic of a true war story.

He says that a true war story lacks morals. It never instructs nor encourages virtue and does not even suggest models of the right human behavior nor restrain men from doing the things they always do.

T. O’Brien does not agree with the thesis that war stories are vehicles for restitution or change. He represents war as hell, mystery, terror, and discovery.

He adds that it is a nasty and thrilling experience that makes people men and also leaves them dead. He says that the irreconcilable opposites need to be together because their oxymoronic togetherness articulates the reality of war. He writes that the recollection of the death of Curt Lemon is possible when the ‘surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which represents the hard and exact truth is seemed’ (O’Brien 78).

The above quote shows that O’Brien deals with the challenge of representation, the weakness of language to convey meaning, flavor, boredom, and the feelings of war. Inscription and re-inscription are the only ways through which he hopes to pass the message on the truth of war appropriately. That is what makes the theme of war in the story a circular and repetitive idea.

For every assertion of truth, it is essential to qualify and represent it for it to be considered authentic. O’Brien creates a situation that conveys the message that no heroism or morality is derived from the experiences of war. It is the source of guilt and shame only. O’Brien presents war as a disembodied presence with a life of its own, where deadly equipment like napalm and white phosphorus undergo a magical transformation into morally acceptable objects of beauty.

He portrays astuteness to the extent that he acknowledges the fact that describing such destruction as beautiful is in itself ugly truth. However, the justification for the truth bases on the role the truth plays.

Ugly truths like the fascination that war begets are bound to be expressed, although in expressing such truths, war is anesthetized and domesticated. The absolute moral indifference that O’Brien relates to bombing raids and artillery barrages is only defendable if the attacks or bombardments have no human agencies behind them (O’Brien 80).

The fact that there are always human agencies behind war and the eloquent portrayal by O’Brien that war maims and kills makes it challenging to uphold an opinion of the moral or aesthetic perspective of war. The unleashing of such negative impacts of war trivializes any morality in war. In presenting an alternative moral view, O’Brien perpetrates a mythic fascination with the horrific occurrences associated with war.

O’Brien says that although war is hell, it is comprised of many other contradictions. A firefight is followed by a mysterious experience of surviving the ordeal.

He says that war is ambiguous and concurs with a story told by Sanders of men who heard things in the forest during the war. He, therefore, concludes by saying that a true war story does not tell the absolute truth. He recalls the circumstances that led to the death of Lemon as he smiled and talked but was killed within a second.

His body was thrown into a tree, and they were instructed to retrieve it with Jensen. O’Brien says that true war stories are identifiable by the questions that follow the war. He retells the story of a man who has nearly killed a grenade as he tried to protect his friends. His message is that war stories that seem true never actually happened.

This essay analyzes Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”. It is a compelling short story of the Vietnam War. In summary, war is its central theme, as shown in numerous researches. This paper on “The Things They Carried” aims to connect O’Brien’s biography with the main issue of the plot.

In the story, different characters are used to express various themes, such as emotional and physical burdens, among others. However, the issue of war runs throughout the story. O Brien is himself one of the characters in the story and tells the story of the war as a person who witnessed it. He is closely connected with the theme of war in the story, such that without him, the issue cannot be brought out so clearly.

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried . New York: Broadway Books, 1998. Print.

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IvyPanda . 2023. "“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-things-they-carried-by-tim-obrien/.

1. IvyPanda . "“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-things-they-carried-by-tim-obrien/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-things-they-carried-by-tim-obrien/.

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Introduction & Overview of The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried Summary & Study Guide Description

First published in Esquire in August, 1986, and later collected in The Best American Short Stories 1987, "The Things They Carried" became the lead story in a book of the same name published in 1990 by Viking Penguin. Since Tim O'Brien had already established himself as a literary voice to be reckoned with, this collection of interrelated stories received a great deal of attention. The book quickly established O'Brien as one of the leading figures in Vietnam literature.

Critics and readers alike have paid considerable attention to the question of whether the events in the book are literally true or products of O'Brien's imagination. Though O'Brien has made it clear in interviews that he believes the truth in literature has nothing to do with what actually happened, the similarities between his writing and his experience in Vietnam are striking. When O'Brien published the disturbing and confessional article "The Vietnam in Me" in the New York Times Magazine in 1994, he sparked renewed interest in the connections between his life and his writing. His last two novels are set in the United States but still prominently feature the Vietnam veteran's experience.

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The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried  is a powerful look into the lives and experiences of foot soldiers during and after the Vietnam war. Written by Tim O’Brien, the work is concurrently an autobiographical account of the war, a memoir, and a collection of short, fictional stories.

O’Brien chose to subtitle the book, “A Work of Fiction”, and successfully and intentionally blurs the lines of reality and fantasy by dedicating his work to individuals who will later be revealed as being the novel’s fictional characters.

To further complicate the overlapping of genres, and the continual shifts between fact and fiction, the protagonist in The Things They Carried  is a veteran of the Vietnam war by the name of “Tim O’Brien.” With the creation of this fictional persona, O’Brien is effectively able to explore his true emotions as if they were fictitious and challenges readers to reconsider stories that they perceive to be false, as they could just as easily be true .

The novel is particularly compelling in part to its originality and the manner in which O’Brien uses the art of storytelling to call upon his own memories of the Vietnam war and the catharsis of the past. Several of the characters in the book seek out resolution.

When reading this study guide, note the designations used to distinguish between Tim O’Brien the author and the fictional character in the novel, “Tim O’Brien”. Despite the similarities that the two share, it is important to remember that the work is a novel and not the autobiography of the author. The novel is, rather, presented as the autobiography of the fictional “Tim O’Brien.”

The medium becomes a part of the message of the novel: the undependable main character “Tim O’Brien” continues to challenge the truth of the stories he tells and the things he hears and passes on, which, in turn, causes the audience to question the truth in the stories that O’Brien shares with them.

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• The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien

• Literature Notes
• The Things They Carried and Loss of Innocence
• Book Summary
• About The Things They Carried
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Critical Essays The Things They Carried and Loss of Innocence

One of the main themes of the novel is the allure of war. This trope, common in war literature, is made more complex here as O'Brien adds the layers of a Conrad-esque "heart of darkness" fascination in the character of Mary Anne.

The seductive allure of war is inextricably linked to the tendencies of human nature in O'Brien's novel. War, more specifically the act of killing, acts as a catalyst for some individuals, causing them to become primal versions of themselves, to become less human, to become killing machines. O'Brien revisits this idea numerous times throughout the text, adding subtle variations on the theme as he introduces different characters that struggle with the same core issue. O'Brien initially creates this tension by offering the counterpoint of O'Brien's daily work duty of declotting slaughtered pigs with his anxiety about his imminent service as a soldier in Vietnam. O'Brien merges the ideas of killing with animals, a symbolic linkage he revisits by describing the soldiers of Alpha Company as animal-like, "humping" their packs and "saddling up" their gear.

O'Brien struggles to hold onto the obverse of this animalism, this barbarism, which is a sort of hyper-civility. He succeeds in doing this by continually offering a highly self-conscious and self-aware cultural criticism that frequently draws on the archetypal works that are the foundation of western civilization like Plato's Republic.

Contrary to the protagonist "O'Brien's" experiential insulation from Vietnamese culture, which is a kind of "uncivilized other" according to the terms of U.S. rhetoric that largely defined the war, Mary Anne Bell is a character who deliberately strove for cultural immersion. For "O'Brien," the landscape and the Vietnamese occupying that landscape, such as the elderly Vietnamese men who watch him revisit the spot where Kiowa perished, are mostly incidental. Mary Anne actively sought out the ways of the Vietnamese, not just to observe from a distance, but to participate in if possible. Mary Anne, who should have behaved according to accepted Western norms, becomes so much a part of the landscape of Vietnam that she becomes "unnatural" to Mark and Rat. For example, the humming they hear coming from the Greenies' hut is freaky and unnatural, somehow not human, but it is Mary Anne's humming. And particularly as a female, she should be "domesticated" and behave in accordance with the readers' expectations of a young woman in a decade prior to the women's liberation movement. Instead she is seduced by the foreign landscape of Vietnam — one which "O'Brien" resists and barely describes — and is reduced to her animal-like primal self, a killing machine. Finally, opposite to "O'Brien," Mary Anne shows no resistance to the landscape, and has the agility and prowess to slip into the jungle like an adept, predatory jungle animal ready for the hunt.

O'Brien relies on symbolism Joseph Conrad created in Heart of Darkness to connect the landscape of Vietnam to the landscape of immorality that Mary Anne succumbs to and "O'Brien" resists. Mary Anne becomes a part of what O'Brien/"O'Brien" most vehemently opposes and what O'Brien/"O'Brien" most fears: the struggle between the light and dark forces of human nature and the predominance of the darker forces. Just as the character of Mary Anne echoes Conrad's character, Kurtz, "O'Brien" is a cousin to Conrad's character, Marlow. Like Marlow, O'Brien struggles against his imagination and the fantastic cultural stories that feed it, in "O'Brien's" case, the stories of World War II he learned from movies and stories of his father's generation. Ultimately, O'Brien shields himself from a fate similar to Mary Anne's through the way he employs stories, just as he did during the summer when he worked at the meatpacking plant, by forcing him to look at the struggle between dark and light within himself.

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"The Things They Carried": Guilt and Trauma in Tim O’Brien's Book

Table of contents, introduction, representation of guilt in the things they carried, norman bowker, tim o’brien.

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Bill Seeks Reparations for Families Displaced From Site of Dodger Stadium

About 1,800 families were forced to leave the land, now known as Chavez Ravine, that eventually became Dodger Stadium. A measure in the State Assembly could provide them with compensation or land.

By Jesus Jiménez

A bill introduced in the California Legislature on Friday will seek reparations for the families of people who were displaced from their homes in Los Angeles in the 1950s on land that eventually became the site of Dodger Stadium.

The bill, introduced by Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo, Democrat of Los Angeles, came after years of calls from organizers who have asked for reparations, either through money or the return of land that they contend was taken from their families.

The land, nestled between the San Gabriel Mountains and downtown Los Angeles, is widely known today as Chavez Ravine. But more than 60 years ago, the roughly 300-acre expanse was the three communities of Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop, where about 1,800 families, most of whom were Mexican American, lived, according to the bill.

The residents of those communities were displaced in the 1950s by the city of Los Angeles, which had said that the land was needed to build affordable housing, according to the bill. The housing project was never built, and eventually the land was acquired by the Dodgers after they moved to Los Angeles from Brooklyn in the late 1950s.

“What happened to the families at those three communities, which are now known as Chavez Ravine, was unjust,” Ms. Carrillo said in an interview on Monday. “The promise of housing was never fulfilled, and those families were also robbed of homeownership and generational wealth because their homes were taken away.”

The bill is one of many that have been recently introduced in California that seek reparations for marginalized communities . If passed, the bill, the Chavez Ravine Accountability Act, would call on the city of Los Angeles to form a nine-member task force to provide compensation to the displaced or their descendants. The measure proposes different forms of compensation, including an offer of city-owned land or fair-market-value compensation.

A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles mayor, the Democrat Karen Bass, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.

The bill also calls for the construction of a permanent memorial in the area to honor those displaced and for a searchable database that details the history of the land acquisition. The database, Ms. Carrillo said, would be essential to verify which families were displaced.

At a news conference in Los Angeles on Friday , Ricardo Lara, who is the state insurance commissioner and a sponsor of the bill, said that the residents of Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop were never adequately compensated for their homes and land.

“Many resisted but eventually all were forced to relocate,” Mr. Lara said. “We believe this legislation will provide not only overdue compensation for the residents of these three vibrant communities, but it will also provide a vehicle for reconciliation and healing.”

Among those who resisted leaving was Aurora Vargas, who went by Lola and who was photographed being carried out of her home by sheriff’s deputies in May 1959.

After learning about the episode, Ms. Vargas’s niece, Melissa Arechiga, 48, founded Buried Under the Blue, a nonprofit that has sought to raise awareness about the history of the displacement of area residents. Ms. Arechiga created the organization in 2018 with Vincent Montalvo, 46, whose grandparents lived in Palo Verde before they were also displaced.

On a video call on Monday, Ms. Arechiga and Mr. Montalvo expressed a mix of emotions — including gratitude and relief — about the legislation.

“You never think these things are going to come,” Mr. Montalvo said. “This wasn’t something of a fairy tale, but now we’re going to be able to dive in deep with the bill as written of getting a lot of the history out.”

Still, Ms. Arechiga and Mr. Montalvo said they wanted to see some changes to the bill, such as the Dodgers having to play a role in the reparations. As written, the bill does not involve the Dodgers and Dodger Stadium.

“Some of this has to come from the Dodgers, too,” Mr. Montalvo said. “Because they’re still benefiting from the land, and they’re still profiting off our lands.”

A spokesman for the Dodgers did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the bill on Monday.

Ms. Arechiga and Mr. Montalvo said they were aware that the bill’s introduction was the first of many steps before it could be passed.

An exact timeline for the bill was unclear, but Ms. Carrillo said that it would be considered by the California Assembly’s Judiciary Committee. The legislation would need to move through the Assembly and the State Senate before landing on the desk of Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, by September, Ms. Carrillo said.

As written, the bill would require the database of former residents to be ready by Jan. 1, 2027, and the database would be needed before any compensation process could begin.

“It’s not over, but it makes it a little bit more real,” Ms. Arechiga said. “It verifies that all the hard work wasn’t for nothing.”

Jesus Jiménez covers breaking news, online trends and other subjects. He is based in New York City. More about Jesus Jiménez