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Innocence In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

1384 Words6 Pages

As people mature and age, they learn from life and become more knowledgeable through experience. These experiences are not always wonderful and some do not have positive impacts on a human or on their psyche. Innocence is the opposite of having these experiences of pain and sadness in the world from which knowledge is gained. It is a purity that many people lose as they grow older. However, this innocence and purity can be retained or taken back for periods of time through the telling of stories and through the language used to tell them. In the novel The Things They Carried, the author, Tim O’Brien, explores storytelling, the past and the present to help him cope with the struggles of war and to regain his innocence. In the section entitled “The Lives of the Dead” from “Linda was nine then…” to “But he was dead.” in the novel, The Things They Carried, O’Brien uses language and storytelling to create a portrait of innocence. Tim …show more content…

The foreshadowing helps to show the reader clues that Timmy misses at the time due to his innocence. One of the first instances of foreshadowing in the passage is when the narrator, Timmy, goes on his first date with Linda and his parents. While they are in the car Timmy notices Linda’s cap that she is wearing, he intends to compliment her and says “Jeez…What a cap.”(O’Brien p.217). After he says this Linda smiles but his mother turns around to look at Timmy. He tells us she looked at him “as if I’d brought up some horrible secret.” (O’Brien p.217). What Timmy is too young and innocent to understand at the time is that Linda wears this cap to hide her scars from her cancer. Timmy is too innocent to think that there is anything odd about the cap even when Linda continues to wear it every day to school. This instance of foreshadowing creates a portrait of innocence due to Timmy’s young

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By telling stories about others, he is not only saving the lives and memories of the deceased, but also his own. In the chapter “Notes”, O’Brien shares the story of Norman Bowker and explains that “It occurred to [him] that the act of writing had led [him] through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. (152) Writing about the soldiers that Tim O’Brien fought alongside in the Vietnam is a therapeutic act that helps him cope with what happened, in a sense saving his own life and preventing the “worse” from happening. In more universal terms, O’Brien conveys that telling stories of his deceased childhood friend, Linda allowed him to ease his pain and confusion surrounding death by letting her live on through imagination. “ [He’s] skimming across the surface of [his] own history, moving fast, riding the melt between the blades, doing loops and spins, and when [he] take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, [he] realizes it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.”

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