Courage And Shame In The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried is a novel by Tim O’Brien, and O’Brien includes himself as the protagonist and implements his experiences as an American soldier going into the Vietnam War. In the novel, O'Brien's a soldier who has to confront his internal conflicts and must deal with his conflicting obligations and desires towards the war. The obligation occurs once he receives a draft requiring him to fight in a war he doesn't believe in along with social pressures. These two conflicts with his desire to listen to his moral judgment which tells him to resist the draft and to just flee. This clash illuminates the work by executing the themes of courage and shame, which occurs again and again throughout the novel.

O’Brien's character best describes that of a politically naive boy whose future of going to Harvard with a full ride scholarship gets dashed away. Dashed away by a single letter that says that he's getting drafted in the Vietnam War. However, he doesn't loathe this legal obligation just because he must abandon the future he had imagined himself to have, it

Tim O’Brien’s struggle with his decision on the matters of his draft notice conveys an emotional turmoil that soldiers no doubt would have also have felt when seeing a similar notice. However, because of the shame that would have brought those soldiers and their families if they were to flee, they decided on what O'Brien also had decided, to fight and only having desires of fleeing away; never acting upon them. However, because he fails to do what he thought was right and follow through with his desire it causes him to believe that even though he survives the Vietnam War, "it's not a happy ending," for he "was a coward," when going into the war. He recalled this because his decision to go to war was motivated by shame, and he just saw himself as a coward who gave in to social pressures that came along with an obligation he never asked