Significance Of Arrow In The Cellist Of Sarajevo

Tim O’Brien’s book, The Things They Carried, is not a casual story based on war, but divided stories that paint a picture of veterans and what they were developing during and after the war. O’Brien brings up hard hitting points in each book that affects a reader in so many ways. O’Brien uses his novel with symbolisms to deeply understand characters, types of grieving each character is affiliated with, and more so what these characters carry emotionally, mentally, and figuratively throughout the book, nevertheless, making these characters relatable with actual people.

Paul’s physical experiences of pain and loss has contributed to his character’s survival instincts and loss of innocence that he feels when joining the army. “The loss of innocence comes as soon as you sign up”, suggests the negative loss

In war conditions, sometimes soldiers are forced to do what they don’t want to do. This action, sometimes makes them feel guilty even if they weren’t. In the novel, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, the author emphasizes that the things soldiers carry in war, the people they killed, the soldier’s feelings, psychology, and the moral of what they have done cannot be all of the soldier’s responsibilities. Soldiers fear that they would be excluded from the society, and they’d be accused from all the wildness of the war because of what they have done. In the chapters, “On the Rainy River” and “Ambush,” the author adumbrate us the emotions that soldiers had been through by using the techniques direct address, the point of view

What does a girl ripped from her home and placed into seclusion and a boy seperated from most of his family and faced with death every day have in common? The answer lies not with their experiences, but within the emotional effects of the aftermath of their traumatic experiences. Jeanne Houston writes about her life in a Japanese-American in her autobiography Farewell to Manzanar, and Elie Wiesel shares his story of the Jewish concentration camps in his autobiography Night. Both of these intimate books reveal truly horrific events and details about the crimes against humanity that went on during WWII, although one author clearly had experienced more appalling episodes. While both Jeannie and Elie suffered heavily and lost family connections

War is an unfortunate consequence of human ignorance and unimaginable to the majority of people. However, in The Things They Carried through detailed storytelling, Tim O’Brien describes the emotions, fear, guilt, and intensity of war to make a point to readers about the senselessness of war. By crafting stories about the guilt involved in death, O’Brien illustrates how the death and insurmountable trauma caused by war is too strong to justify it. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien uses Mary Anne and Tim’s respective transformations, and the bottling up of emotions experienced by Norman Bowker and Rat Kiley to demonstrate the dangerous desensitization and mental harm that war causes, and thus war’s senselessness.

Those involved in war must pay a physical, emotional, and psychological tax. In the Vietnam War, this tax was greater than ever and weighed more once the war was over. The impact is not easily forgotten and though attempts are made to heal, war haunts the psyche of those who survive it. In the case of Tim O’Brien and Yusuf Komunyakaa, it took nearly two decades to put pen to paper and write about the experience. Luckily, their time in Vietnam eventually lead to powerful work such as O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” and Komunyakaa’s “Facing It”.

People comprehend war very differently; they either hate it, understand it, or love it; there are many literary works with stories depicting these points of view. In 1990, author Tim O’Brien described his view of war with his “work of fiction” The Things They Carried, a book supposedly based on his experiences in the Vietnam War. His descriptive and emotional work richly depicts the feelings and activities of several drafted soldiers in the Vietnam War. Twenty-two years later and based on an entirely different war, came American Sniper, the memoir of a sniper in the Iraq War, by Chris Kyle. Kyle’s proud and rhapsodizing work depicts his strong supportive feelings for the war and what he did there. While The Things

The shoe horn sonata by John Misto is a highly evocative play which explores the up-to-then largely forgotten history of female prisoners of the Japanese during WW2, by looking at the stories of two characters, Bridie and Sheila. Misto has effectively incorporated a wide range of language techniques both visual and auditory, which create powerful images in the responders’ mind to achieve distinctively visual ideas.

When reading “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, he writes a captivating story of sorrow, terror, love, and a desire to gain freedom from the war within. Within this war, these men face emotional baggage and in Lieutenant Cross’s life, he carries the burden of death. However, within this story is a sense of love, an imagination of affection, and the freedom with safety. O’Brien envelopes the reader saying, “True war stories do not generalize…It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe” (O’Brien). During the development of this novel, O’Brien references women in photographs and in the memories of the soldiers. These women intrigue the reading audience with inspiration and hope, but offer

War, in whatever form it may be, significantly affects an individual’s life and postwar identity. The experiences one must endure place a tattoo, an imprint on one’s past and future. This permanent marker of the atrocities of war and of the psychological effects of violence remains with a soldier throughout his or her life. In the novel, The Things They Carried, narrator and protagonist, Tim O’ Brien, uses his gift of pen to illustrate his personal experience in the Vietnam War. His collection of stories, blurred by lines of fact and fiction, highlights the importance of the act of storytelling rather than the objective truth of a war story.

The Challenge of Bravery and Courage are unexpected obstacles for everyone who was drafted into the Vietnam War, especially for Tim O’Brien who is the narrator and the Author of “The Things They Carried”. Before O’Brien gets drafted into the Vietnam War, he highlights the consumption of tone and juxtaposition on the effects of war while his allies are trying to empathize to his feelings. The theme also relates to Khaled Hosseini’s story “Kite Runner” where as a kid, Amir struggled with bravery and courage when he wasn’t there for Hassan. In Order for O’Brien to seek truth behind War, he’ll need to experience the environment in-action which is why he was forced to see everything later on in the story.

Whether fiction or partial non-fiction, in this short story of the “Things They Carried” Tim O’Brien tries to place the reader in the soldier’s daily life during the war. He did this by introducing the characters not by describing their personalities, but by using the things they carried to give us a picture of that character. Out of respect or confidentiality he prefers not to use specific characteristics of each person, but instead opts to use symbolic representations through what they carried. He uses this method on each character individually and then proceeds to use the same method to describe the platoon or all the characters as a whole.

“My Music My War” is a book displaying the findings of a study done by ethnomusicologist, Lisa Gilman. Throughout the book, it gives insight to daily lives of soldiers during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not only does it allow readers to explore the lives of soldiers, it also allows readers to examine how music affected the people in the midst of war. “My Music My War” exemplifies how musical listening can relate to a wide variety of topics, such as gender, politics, and trauma.

Death and destruction caused by war can become permanently embedded in the minds of those who actively participated in combat long after the conflict has officially come to an end. Their memories, decisions, and personality can be influenced by what they experienced while serving in combat. The burdens that were placed upon them by horrible circumstances have the ability to become a permanent fixture, never leaving a person for as long as they exist. Tim O’Brien explores the origin of these burdens throughout one of his most famous works. Through a psychological analysis, it can be determined that O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” connects the temporary physical burdens with the permanent emotional burdens experienced by soldiers during

This is a dramatic change since “[she is] Arrow because [she hates] them, [and] the women [she was] hated nobody” (Galloway 13). Arrow does not hesitate to “pull the trigger”, a feat that Alisa would struggle with (Galloway 12). However, even as Arrow is killing enemies on the battlefield, traces of Alisa’s personality remain. Arrow prefers to “keep her hands clean”, refusing to “kill just because [people] say [she] must” (Galloway 71). Despite the fact that Alisa’s values continue to guide Arrow, ensuring she does not lose her humanity, she still kills enemy soldiers without regret. However, upon hearing the cellist play, her mindset changes. The cellist’s music, a symbol for hope, causes her to start doubting the choices she is making as Arrow, and she wonders if things can be different. As she progresses through the story, Arrow’s thoughts begin to align more and more with Alisa’s original values and beliefs. When she sees an enemy sniper enjoy the music of the cellist, she realizes “she does not want to kill this man” (Galloway 153). This is because, she no longer sees the sniper as a faceless, nameless killer,