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Death In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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Experiencing death affects your mental state vastly, and with this mental alteration, your physical and imaginary world falls behind it. In Tim O’Brien's The Things They Carried, there is a lot of death, including his first love and an old Vietnamese man. These deaths caused many different emotions for O’Brien, including vivid dreams and an almost dead but alive state. O’Brien experiences a lot of death, and this death caused him to almost hallucinate and have very vivid dreams. After O’Brien sees Linda dead, he tells us about how he would dream about Linda, and he starts to think about Linda when she was alive. He would make “up elaborate stories to bring Linda alive in [his] sleep”(O’Brien 230). O’Brien was only young when Linda died, and …show more content…

When O’Brien first joined his platoon, they raided a village, and in that village was a dead old man that they had found. When the platoon passes by the old man “they just grabbed the old man's hand and offered a few words and moved away” (O’Brien 214). By shaking the old mans hand they personify him, making him seem alive, although he is clearly dead. By making him feel like an alive person they are coping with the fact that he was dead because if they thought about everyone being dead when they kill, they would go insane. The way they are talking to him and personifying him is in a way a sort of celebration of life. By talking to a dead person, they are showing how life is created by interaction and thought instead of breathing or still. When O’Brien is asked to go introduce himself to the old man, he refuses despite all the heckling. He later feels “sickness inside [himself], but it wasn't the old man's corpse so much, it was that awesome act of greeting the dead” (O’Brien 215). O’Brien believes that greeting the old man was a sick thing to do, yet he wanted to see Linda and greet her. O’Brien believes greeting the old man was sick because they were the enemy, yet they were being civil once they were dead. In a way, not greeting the old man was a way of showing loyalty and responsibility. At the same time to keep your sanity it is

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