A Literary Analysis Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

Literary Analysis of The Things They Carried

Young men and women who go off to war and rarely return home the same. The complex psychological scars often outnumber the physical. In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien emphasizes the emotional struggles faced by a group of infantrymen during the Vietnam war. The author, himself a Vietnam veteran, is now well past seventy years old, yet he still suffers the effects of this war. To this day he imagines himself safely in a deep bunk in the jungles of Vietnam just to fall asleep (Rosenwald). In this story, the author uses, setting, characters and symbolism to show the incalculable burden soldiers carry in war. The author describes the setting for the Vietnam War by detailing the extreme landscape and climate faced by a US infantry soldier. Rice patties are not something a young American would have been accustomed to seeing, so the repeated reference to them helps to convey the otherworldly environment these young men found themselves fighting and dying in. The author directly emphasizes how the soldiers struggle and "carried the land itself": "The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the

Despite being unable to list the actual weight of each soldier’s “emotional baggage”, the author conveys how these “intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight” (O’Brien 574-575). The reader begins to understand how a soldier living in a war zone struggles with the uncertainty of whether they’ll be alive much longer: “They carried their own lives. The pressures were enormous” (O’Brien 572). This use of symbolism leaves the reader with a much broader understanding of the psychological impact war has on a