Tim O’Brien’s The Things they Carried, is a collection of stories from fictional characters that fought in the Vietnam War. The book starts off with a description of what the soldiers “carried” with them. This included both material, and immaterial things. Soldiers carried things that we considered “necessities” , such as weapons, water, canned food, and much more. Some more examples of material thing include letters from loved ones, “lucky charms” from loved ones, etc. O’Brien used the list of physical objects that soldiers carry to show the emotional burdens that these soldiers bear. One example is how many of the soldiers are struggling to distinguish between fantasy and reality. The reason why O’Brien decides to do is, so he can show the reader what it felt like in the war. He wants to show us that even when the soldiers weren’t in a fire fight, they were always struggling; some physically, others emotionally.
One example of this is Jimmy Cross. He is holding on to a letter from the love of his life, Martha. The letter is not a love letter, but every night, Jimmy sits there and fantasies about the life Martha, and the life that he plans on having with her after the war is over. He is not certain if Martha loves him, but he tries to make himself think that she does. The reason I believe that soldiers were fantasizing instead of being realistic, is because there was a war going on in the real world. There was nothing good in what they were doing every single day, killing people, and having to think about that every day is ideal for many people. Thus, they had no choice but to try and themselves feel happy, and the best way to do that is to fantasize about the people they left back and the life they were going to have after the war. Not many soldiers saw the negative effects of fantasizing but there are a few. One is that it interferes with the duties of being a soldier. They would get caught up into the idea too much, and lose sight of reality and the war, thus, putting their lives and the lives of fellow soldiers in dangerous.
One interesting concept that O’Brien explores is the idea of what a “hero” is. A “hero” in our society is someone who tries to make the world a better place, and puts other people needs before their own. In chapter 4, On the Rainy River, O’Brien starts talking about what a hero is. He does this through telling us war stories, and giving examples of people he saw as heroes. To O’Brien, a hero is someone who has the courage to stand by their convictions and is able to the hard decisions, and stick by them, which not many people can do. O’Brien shows us that he is not a hero. He failed to stand by his own beliefs, and go into Canada and not enlist in the war. However, he didn’t; shame and embarrassment caused him to return back to the states and enlist in a war he didn’t have any reason to believe in. Thus, a hero is not someone who sacrifices his own life for the greater good, or a life of another to save many more, but someone who is able to stand by his own beliefs and make decisions that no one else can.
Another concept that was very interesting in the book was truth vs. the true. Many people would consider these two words synonymous, and in a sense they are. However, in these stories I believe they’re a bit different. Truth, I think, is what really happened and what can be proven. The true, I believe, is also true, but not the ultimate truth. In one event, many people can perceive something in a different way, and when they tell what happened, they are telling their own perception of what happened, and that’s not necessarily a lie, but there can be many different versions of the story because everyone perceived it differently. So, the true, is what one single person perceives and believes happened, truth, is the ultimate truth.
The last chapter of the book, The Live of the Dead, O’Brien talks about the girl that he loved, Linda. Linda died at a very young age due to brain cancer. Linda’s death symbolizes O’Brien’s “loss of innocence” because with that event he experiences both love and death for the first time. This helped him throughout his time in Vietnam because he had dealt with the death of someone he loved prior to going to Vietnam.
This book was an amazing piece of writing. Although, this book may seem like a non-fiction, it’s actually a fiction. Both the characters and the stories within this book are fictional. However, the ideas behind the story is not made up, soldiers in Vietnam really did go through most of things found within this book. O’Brien does a great job getting the things that happened in Vietnam across to the reader through the use of fictional stories. This book was the kind that tried to show us what soldiers where feeling, and what they were going through. It wasn’t as much about fighting, as most war novels are. This book did a great job explaining to us what soldiers had to deal with in the war, besides the obvious.
No comments:
Post a Comment