Curt Lemon Short Story

“That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future ... Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story” (36). The Things They Carried is a captivating novel that gives an inside look at the life of a soldier in the Vietnam War through the personal stories of the author, Tim O’Brien . Having been in the middle of war, O’Brien has personal experiences to back up his opinion about the war. In The Things They Carried, O’Brien reveals his view on war through telling his readers how the Vietnam War had no point, was emotionally devastating, and displaying that there is no purpose in war unless the soldiers know what they are fighting for.

Tim O’Brien’s uncommon ending sentence that have caught many people by surprise in the story, “Where have you gone, Charming Billy?” which was wrote as a historical fiction that revolves around the Vietnamese war. It leads you to O’Brien’s perspective on why war is bad. The story also shows how things are not okay, even after the war. O’Brien shows the realities of war through repetition of thoughts about fear, how soldiers deal with it, and the effect it has on their actions.

In November of 1955, the United States entered arguably one of the most horrific and violent wars in history. The Vietnam War is documented as having claimed about 58,000 American lives and more than 3 million Vietnamese lives. Soldiers and innocent civilians alike were brutally slain and tortured. The atrocities of such a war are near incomprehensible to those who didn’t experience it firsthand. For this reason, Tim O’Brien, Vietnam War veteran, tries to bring to light the true horrors of war in his fiction novel The Things They Carried. The novel focuses on coping with the death and horror of war. It also speaks volumes about the true nature of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the never-ending struggle of dealing with it. In the

Death is something that occurs often in a war due to the violence and dangerous areas. Everyone takes on the thought of someone dying in different ways, whether they maintained a close relationship with the person or not guilt could become an instant reaction of the persons' death because of a feeling of maybe being responsible for the death that occurred. The thought of maybe being responsible for one of the soldiers that you have spent day night serving with could leave an enormous amount of guilt in one person. When witnessing a death or anything traumatic it is easy to blame someone else or even yourself for the tragic accident. Multiple characters in the book The Things They Carried demonstrated the guilt and responsibility of another

In the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, the soldiers have to carry a lot of things physically and mentally. One of the biggest things the soldiers have to carry is conflict, but not just between other people, inside of themselves as well. In the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien the author has an internal conflict of whether to go fight in the war in Vietnam or to run away to Canada which he tells through the story “On the Rainy River.”

“Later we heard that Strunk died somewhere over Chu Lai, which seemed to relieve Dave Jensen of an enormous weight.” (p. 63)

This quote is Important because Tim O 'Brien is explaining how he felt like every eye in his town was on him.Felt embarrassed because he didn 't wanted to go to war.He could hear people screaming at him,Traitor ! he couldn 't endure the mockery or the disgrace or the patriotic ridicule .And right then he Submitted.He would go to war,he would killed,and maybe died because he was embarrassed not to. He didn´t wanted to runaway and look like he wasn´t brave man.He was just

Imagine being drafted to move thousands of miles away from the life you love to fight a war you hated. This is the unfortunate reality for Tim O’Brien In The Things They Carried. O’Brien explains his experiences of war in Vietnam, what it took to get him there, and his relationships with the other men in his platoon. He portrays guilt and pride through storytelling and intertwines the two by showing how the men often feel guilty for the actions they pursue or decisions they make based on their pride.

In The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien we are introduced to the characters Azar and Henry Dobbins. These characters have many differences, especially in personality traits. O’ Brien didn’t necessarily include them in the text to show us some big secret that we didn’t notice, but for the purpose of this report, he did. The characters Azar and Henry Dobbins can be seen as representations of the different ways a person might react during a war or some other traumatic experience.

In his hometown he “followed the tar road on its seven-mile loop around the lake, then he started all over agian”(131) eleven times, while recollecting scenes from the field. With no one to talk to, Norman imagines how his father, Max Arnold, a high school friend that drowned in a lake, and Sally Kramer, his high school crush, would have reacted to his war stories. An important anecdote that Norman “would’ve told” to his father, was about the Silver Star he almost won. Though he “might then have listed the seven medals he did win”, he told the story of how Kiowa was killed in the field and how he was not able to get his friend out out of the sludge. Norman would have explained to his father “that many brave men do not win medals for their bravery”(135). Even during the war he wished that his father would send him a letter saying that it does not matter how many medals he wins because, “That's all [his] old man talks about, nothing else. How he can't wait to see [his] goddamn medals."(34) The pressure of meeting his father’s expectations has weighed on him since the beginning of the war, but he is not able to talk to his father about it. Norman just thinks about what would happen if he would have expressed his feelings. As he was driving he noticed “four workmen… setting up for the evening fireworks”(138) and he whispered from his car, “Want

This chapter “The Ghost Soldiers”, showed us how Tim O’Brien and the other soldiers were dealing with the war both physically and psychologically. It also shows us how the Tim O'Brien behaved and felt when he was shot, wounded and had a bacteria infection on his butt and how the war changed the way he thought, and viewed the other soldiers around him.

The Things They Carried is an interesting novel not like many others in that it is not one continuous story on a single plot line, but rather the novel is a collection of fictional short stories from a young soldier’s time stationed in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The stories do not follow a specific order either, and they often are set in different time periods, like how Chapters 1 (The Things They Carried), 2 (Love), and 3 (Spin) are set in the time period when the main character, Tim O’Brien, is deployed in Vietnam, while Chapter 4 (On the Rainy River) is set before the war started right after Tim was drafted, and tells the story of him trying to escape the war. The stories tell the reader the story of the differing backgrounds of many

The book “Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock” by Matthew Quick was quite the read. The main character, Leonard Peacock, seems a bit insane because already in the first chapter, he says, “Especially after I actually kill Asher Beal and off myself.” (Pg 5) Now that could be taken as a horrible joke, but he also has the P-83 handgun. He really means it. This whole book is a twenty-four hour setting, so this character develops rather quickly. Leo appears to be a teenager who just turned 18, and wants to kill this other guy, Asher. As the book continues along, we learn that our main character was actually raped by Asher. Leonard bought four presents for four people that were special to him, which in a way proves that he still has a heart. Without a doubt, what Asher did is completely

War is one of the most controversial and fascinating aspects of human life, which includes sacrifice, argument, and worst of all human death. The argument of war is whether or not the sacrifice of human life is necessary or not. The authors of My Brother Sam Is Dead are totally against war; they are neutral and they give Tim the same idea as them in the novel. They even show the irony and cruelty of war in the book by the punishing and ironic deaths of Ned, Sam, and Life. This novel is based in Redding, Conneticut during the time of the Revolutionary War. Tim Meeker’s family has been split up as a result of the war because Tim’s father is a loyalist while his brother, who he looks up to, enrolls in the war as a Patriot. Tim has to grow up through the novel and he has to decide for himself

Lots of stories are hard to comprehend because they’re more brutal and traumatic for listeners, even the story-teller. In three stories: “The Man I Killed”, “How To Tell A True War Story”, and “Speaking of Courage”, Tim O’Brien showed how changing certain parts of a story and making them graceful, can make them easier to comprehend. However sometimes telling the story the way it was makes it brutal and gruesome, though some listeners prefer that over gracefulness. Telling a true war story can be hard to do, because soldiers are tempted to change some traumatic aspects to make the story easier to comprehend, and not so traumatic for the listener.