Jimmy Cross In The Things They Carried

Continuing To Be Affected

Soldiers participating in a war they do not understand, suffer physical and mental anguish trying to cope with the horrors of it all. Tim O’Brien is both the narrator and protagonist of the short story “The Things They Carried.” He enters the war a scared young man afraid of the shame that dodging the war would bring him and leaves the war a guilt-ridden middle-aged man who tells stories about Vietnam in order to cope with his painful memories. Jimmy Cross’s character represents the deep effects responsibility has on those who are too immature to handle it. As a sophomore in college, he signs up for the Reserve Officers Training Corps because it is worth a few credits and because his friends are doing it. But he doesn’t care about the war and has no desire to be a team leader. In this short story O’Brien and Jimmy Cross are only a couple of the many who have

O’Brien uses metaphor when he explains how the soldiers carried more weight as we see most of the major characters carry fear and guilt in their hearts. It becomes a burden whose weight lasts in history. The physical objects and weapons symbolize the nature of war and immediately the reader is able to tell that the mood and the tone of the story is sad and anxious. The fact that some characters in the story took tranquilizers to calm down their nerves clearly shows that, the war period was depressive to the soldiers. The soldiers blame themselves for the death of their counterparts. Just like the soldiers, we carry love, memories and grief of those who die in the war. The war also depicts the inhumanity involved in that, many commit evils and crimes in the name of war. Through the use of imagery, Tim O'Brien presents graphical descriptions of the reality of war. These descriptions form the lenses through which the reader sees and perceives the stories as the author