Things they Carried
O'Brien tends to use a long list of physical objects that the soldiers carried while in the war. He describes the objects as an emotional burden that haunts the soldiers. These objects give the soldiers strength and willingness to confront the tension between reality and fantasy. Also when the soldiers did not fight they had nothing to do but look at these object and have their free time. The soldiers had nothing better to do then remind them of their emotional burdens that they were trying to run away from. "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, the
"The title of this short story brings a lot of meaning. He explicitly demonstrates his characters' natures not by describing them but by showing the items they carried with them in such dire circumstances. It signifies all the heavy and personal baggage that the soldiers carry with them during their time at war. Wilber describes The Things They Carried as a subtle but "definitive" line of demarcation. The story was based on the items that they were carrying. "Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction that makes his book unforgettable. While doing research I came across an article by Alix Wilber. The story seems to interlink between war reflections and the story of Lavender's death. Wilber describes that the narrator of most of theses stories is "Tim" but O'Brien freely that many event he states in his collections never happen. The significance was not as important to the emotional battle that the men seemed to carry during their time of service.
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Acceptance Essays
