Tim O'Brien Research Papers Samples For Students

Question 4

How does love figure into the development of the text? What is O’Brien trying to say about the relationship between love and war?
In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien brings a story of the American platoon soldiers who were deployed to fight for a good course in the Vietnam War. The whole novel is a collection of stories of the experiences of these soldiers during their time in the jungle as they fought far away from home. As the narrator, O’Brien brings a clear picture of the real and fictitious occurrences in the battlefield. Although the central theme ...

In his story The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien ostensibly tells a tale about the war in Vietnam that, in actuality, is a mirror of the human condition exposed through the horror of human conflict. In so doing, O’Brien uses an old philosophical theme first set in writing by Aristotle. Through the angst of conflict, O’Brien succeeds in demonstrating the essence of being. Aristotle pointed out that to be complete in essence; a being must be “in the is, and in the is not” (Aristotle 1050). That is, a whole human is the product of both ...

“The Things They Carried” seems like a simple story concerning the items carried by soldiers while in Vietnam. But in the real sense, Tim O’Brien uses the stories to focus on the terrible conditions of Vietnam as well as the death of one soldier. He believed that the things men carried inside, and those they did or the ones they felt they had to do was so sad (O’Brien 57). It can be described as a powerful meditation by the Vietnam soldiers that is somehow fictional and fact. Besides, the author created a protagonist as a fictional ...

Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam war anthology The Things They Carried follows a platoon of American soldiers both in and out of the field, showing the toll that the war itself took on these men and women. The nature of humanity, the senselessness of war, and the importance of relationships to human beings are highlighted in the metatextual and historical makeup of this short story collection. O’Brien makes heavy use of symbolism and metafiction to create a highly stylized world of the Vietnam experience, each of the stories providing their own perspectives and symbols to show the effect of Vietnam ...