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Guilt In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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Guilt on a soldier’s mind Guilt often weighs heavy on many soldier’s conscience, as one marine puts it “I can't forgive myself, And the people who can forgive me are dead.” - Marine Capt. Timothy Kudo. In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, war-induced guilt can lead to psychologically isolation, distortion of the truth, and the breakdown of memory. Veterans who come back from war have trouble with feeling guilty from what they’ve seen happen and what they had to do. In war, guilt has detrimental effects on many of the soldiers even driving Norman Bowker to suicide. Tim O’Brien struggles to tell certain stories because of the effect guilt have on him and he says “Even now, I'll admit, the story makes me squirm. For more than twenty years …show more content…

Guilt can lead to a feeling of isolation and hopelessness. Often times when guilt weighs heavy on someone’s mind it can be the only thing that you think of. Norman Bowker talks about how he feels guilty about Kiowa’s death in the following way. “I felt sort of guilty almost, like if I'd kept my mouth shut none of it would've ever happened. Like it was my fault." […] "Nobody's fault," [Bowker] said. "Everybody's" (172). Even Bowker can recognize that it was not only his fault for Kiowa’s death, but it was everybody’s. Norman is practicing the art of cognitive dissonance because he knows it wasn’t exactly his fault for Kiowa’s death, but he cannot stop blaming himself. Bowker isolated himself from society so much that instead of talking to other people about how he felt he just made up the conversations in his head. Because of this psychological isolation he committed suicide. O’Brien talks about how he feels guilty just because he is alive and he has to deal with the memory of the dead. He says “There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief” (172). He feels guilty because he was too afraid to deal with the emotions then, and now he feels like the only person dealing with the guilt

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