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Summary Of Tim O 'Brien's The Things They Carried'

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In W.H. Auden’s Funeral Blues (pg. 762), the poem takes place shortly after the speaker’s beloved has passed away and shows how the speaker is forever changed by the beloved’s death and that feels that he will never recover. The speaker talks about how he feels that love doesn’t last forever and how he wants the whole world to experience the grief and sorrow he is feeling. In Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried” (pg. 433), the story follows Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and his command during the Vietnam War. Lt. Cross constantly spends most of his time fantasizing about a girl named Martha, who he has an unrequited crush. However after witnessing the death of one of his soldiers, while he was preoccupied thinking about Martha, Cross …show more content…

In “The Things They Carried”, Lieutenant Cross loses his idealism that he could return to his previous life and act as if the war never happened after Ted Lavender is killed by a sniper. After Lavender is killed, Lt. Cross realizes that he can’t continue to live in the pass and proceeds to get rid of all the objects (letters, pictures, and a “lucky” stone) that Martha gave him and decides to focus on protecting his command. This quote, “On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha’s letters. Then he burned the two photographs.” (pg. 444), helps to show Lt. Cross’s decision to move on from his past and focus on leading his command. Lt. Cross feels that if he hadn’t been …show more content…

The readers don’t know any of the specifics pertaining to the speaker’s relationship with the beloved, only that the beloved has passed away. The gray area in “The Things They Carry” is Lt. Crowd’s past before he was sent to fight in the Vietnam War. There is no real information about Lt. Cross’s past other than the college that he was attending and that he met Martha sometime while he was attending college. I believe that knowing the Lt. Cross’s past, it would have allowed the reader to have a better understanding of his personality and have a deeper understanding of his overall character. The ambiguities that I find to the theme of the moment where the character loses their sense of their idealism and discovers that bad things happen is a person going through life-changing events. When a life-changing event occurs in a person’s life, it has a major influence in the way the that person perceives their life whether it be good or bad. This idea of a life-changing events mirrors the theme perfectly, because it helps to show that a specific event can change your life forever and affect the life that the person knows forever. While knowing the gray areas and ambiguities is crucial to understanding the theme, I believe that “The Things They Carry” does a better job than Funeral Blues in using the two elements in order to explain the

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