The Man I Killed Theme

The jungle itself seems to symbolize the effects of the war. The events that take place in it cause the soldiers to become paranoid, crazy, and even dangerous. Even once they return to their once stable home of the US, they are completely changed. The setting is very important to the book, because it creates an eerie and scary atmosphere in the story, that the author uses to show how the war truly affected the soldiers fighting in it. Overall, the setting of the story is complex, because it varies through the chapters. O’Brien uses the frightening Vietnam setting to illustrate how it affected soldiers fighting in it and also how horrifying the setting of it was. He also used the setting of the US to illustrate what kinds of lives the characters

Tim O’Brien’s uncommon ending sentence that have caught many people by surprise in the story, “Where have you gone, Charming Billy?” which was wrote as a historical fiction that revolves around the Vietnamese war. It leads you to O’Brien’s perspective on why war is bad. The story also shows how things are not okay, even after the war. O’Brien shows the realities of war through repetition of thoughts about fear, how soldiers deal with it, and the effect it has on their actions.

Tim O’Brien is a writer that, while impressive, can be described as indulgent with his words; going on for pages at a time on one topic and not sparing a single detail. This of course is part of his charm. If you look to the first four pages of “The Man I Killed” in his The Things I Carried, in order to show the obsession, feelings, and shock that can come from killing someone, O’Brien makes use of repetition, tone, and appeal to logos.

In November of 1955, the United States entered arguably one of the most horrific and violent wars in history. The Vietnam War is documented as having claimed about 58,000 American lives and more than 3 million Vietnamese lives. Soldiers and innocent civilians alike were brutally slain and tortured. The atrocities of such a war are near incomprehensible to those who didn’t experience it firsthand. For this reason, Tim O’Brien, Vietnam War veteran, tries to bring to light the true horrors of war in his fiction novel The Things They Carried. The novel focuses on coping with the death and horror of war. It also speaks volumes about the true nature of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the never-ending struggle of dealing with it. In the

The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, illustrates the experiences of a man and his comrades throughout the war in Vietnam. Tim O’Brien actually served in the war, so he had a phenomenal background when it came to telling the true story about the war. In his novel, Tim O’Brien uses imagery to portray every necessary detail about the war and provide the reader with a true depiction of the war in Vietnam.

Teenagers have always sought to be their own person, forgoing rules and even recommendations in favour of self-determination. While an honourable undertaking, this path to self-discovery, leads them to experience new ordeals, where mistakes will be made. To reassure us that these mistakes are not necessarily bad, Elizabeth Alexander, in her poem "Nineteen", illustrates how youth 's desire for freedom¬ and to escape from their reality allows them to grow into adulthood and leads them to make choices that will impact their perception of the world. This theme will be analysed through structure, symbolism and contrast.

In the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, the soldiers have to carry a lot of things physically and mentally. One of the biggest things the soldiers have to carry is conflict, but not just between other people, inside of themselves as well. In the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien the author has an internal conflict of whether to go fight in the war in Vietnam or to run away to Canada which he tells through the story “On the Rainy River.”

Readers, especially those reading historical fiction, always crave to find believable stories and realistic characters. Tim O’Brien gives them this in “The Things They Carried.” Like war, people and their stories are often complex. This novel is a collection stories that include these complex characters and their in depth stories, both of which are essential when telling stories of the Vietnam War. Using techniques common to postmodern writers, literary techniques, and a collection of emotional truths, O’Brien helps readers understand a wide perspective from the war, which ultimately makes the fictional stories he tells more believable.

In Tim O’Brien’s novel, “The Things They Carried”, many details throughout the chapters created different themes that one must pick up on by reading thoroughly into the text. “The Man I Killed” and “Ambush” are examples of that with the common subject of the unknown created by the “fog” in both chapters. The fog represents the unknown and deception, and looking deeper into the text, one can see the philosophical implications O’Brien creates using the fog and literary devices to create a deeper storyline within the novel.

In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the author retells the chilling, and oftentimes gruesome, experiences of the Vietnam war. He utilizes many anecdotes and other rhetorical devices in his stories to paint the image of what war is really like to people who have never experienced it. In the short stories “Spin,” “The Man I Killed,” and “ ,” O’Brien gives reader the perfect understanding of the Vietnam by placing them directly into the war itself.

The Things They Carried is an interesting novel not like many others in that it is not one continuous story on a single plot line, but rather the novel is a collection of fictional short stories from a young soldier’s time stationed in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The stories do not follow a specific order either, and they often are set in different time periods, like how Chapters 1 (The Things They Carried), 2 (Love), and 3 (Spin) are set in the time period when the main character, Tim O’Brien, is deployed in Vietnam, while Chapter 4 (On the Rainy River) is set before the war started right after Tim was drafted, and tells the story of him trying to escape the war. The stories tell the reader the story of the differing backgrounds of many

Tim O’Brien never lies. While we realise at the end of the book that Kiowa, Mitchell Sanders and Rat Kiley are all fictional characters, O’Brien is actually trying to tell us that there is a lot more truth hidden in these imagined characters than we think. This suggests that the experiences he went through were so traumatic, the only way to describe it was through the projection of fictional characters. O’Brien explores the relationship between war experiences and storytelling by blurring the lines between truth and fiction. While storytelling can change and shape a reader’s opinions and perspective, it might also be the closest in helping O’Brien cope with the complexity of war experiences, where the concepts like moral and immorality are being distorted. “How to Tell a True War Story” and “Ambush” are stories that both explore on topics: truth, the real definition of a true war story, and the role of truth.

Based on both Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and the interviews of Vietnam veterans, being a soldier in Vietnam means to sacrifice your views on war for your county. This is explored both O’Brien’s book, as well as in the interview of Vietnam veteran, Charles G. Richardson. O’Brien was always against the war; he felt that as he identified as a liberal, he should not have been in Vietnam. Richardson, however, had an interesting take on this. “I don’t like war; none of us do. But, I do enjoy my freedom. And without the sacrifices that we have to make, I do not feel that we would enjoy the freedom that we have today,” (Richardson). This quote is a great example of showing a man who was a true patriot and Vietnam soldier, despite disliking

The theme of the book, I Hunt Killers, is you don’t have to follow in your parents’ footsteps. This is the theme for many reasons. First and foremost, Jazz doesn’t want to be like his father. Jazz’s father was a cold blooded killer who was sent to prison for over 120 murders. Jazz is determined not to become like this and will do anything to avoid killing. The second reason is that in order to avoid becoming like his father, Jazz tries to solve murders instead of commit them. Jazz feels a strong, almost obsessive, need to try and solve any murder case that approaches Lobo’s Nod. The third reason is Jazz’s determination to be a good person. Jazz has memories of what his father had done to people and what his father said to him. Jazz tries to

“The Man I Killed”, O’Brien imagines what the man’s life was like before he came to the war. The whole time, Tim O’Brien seems to be in a state of shock and he goes back and forth between describing the man’s life and describing the dead body. “Ambush” is set in the present and O’Brien is asked by his daughter if he ever killed someone. He tells her no then goes into a scenario in his mind of if she had been an adult; he imagines telling her of the man he killed from start to finish.