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Imagery In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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Controversy of the Iraq War sparked an ethical conversation that was similar to the Vietnam War, authors such as Tim O’Brien and Chris Kyle share their primary accounts on their thoughts of war. In 1990, about 15 years after the Vietnam war ended, Tim O’Brien publishes his work of fiction called, The Things They Carried. The Things They Carried was a melancholy, detailed collection of short stories that follows the protagonist, Tim O’Brien and his company of men before, during and after the Vietnam War. Later in 2012, after his tour of duty in Iraq, Chris Kyle publishes his memoir of his accounts in Iraq. American Sniper is a patriotic, straightforward novel that explains Kyle’s thought process while he’s at the Iraq War. The Things They …show more content…

Visible imagery is used when O’Brien describes the man’s corpse, he describes the man in great detail which humanizes the Vietnamese soldier. The more the protagonist describes the man, the more the feeling of regret and guilt sets into the reader and it makes the effects of war more daunting. The author also touches kinesthetic imagery by making the reader feel for the author when he begins to create the corpse’s backstory. The readers feels sympathy for O’Brien because he is already consumed with guilt and pain. In the story, O’Brien reflects his own life onto the Vietnamese soldier and the reader sees that. The author uses these to types of imagery to protest war by humanizing the Vietnamese soldier rather than making the soldier into a heartless monster. Unlike Chris Kyle, who shapes the citizen and soldiers of Iraq into being one huge enemy whose one mission is to kill Americans. The excerpt in American Sniper states, “The Marines we flooding up the road, marching north to liberate the country from Saddam Hussein.. We landed on al-Faw Peninsula and secured the oil terminal there so Saddam couldn’t set it ablaze as he had during the First Gulf War.. Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of

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