The Things They Carried Why Does Tim O Brien Use Of Structure

In “The Things They Carried” the protagonist Tim O'Brien who is the writer and a Vietnam War veteran, writes about all his memories of the war and the other men who served with him in order to find meaning in the memories. O'Brien uses a non-linear structure that includes frequent flashbacks throughout the book. “The Things They Carried” revealed the challenges each soldier faced and it defined why this book was different from a traditional linear narrative. Each chapter throughout the book grabs the reads and leaves them to want to read more and more. With this different structure, O'Brien was able to really reveal all the raw details that happened in the past that impacted the soldier futures.

An example of how O’Brien uses a different

Who in the beginning is a naive young woman but then drastically changes into something else. In the illustration, he states, “She had long white legs and blue eyes and a complexion like strawberry ice cream, very friendly too(O'Brien 89).” “A bubbly personality, a happy smile (O'Brien 90).” This reveals that when Mary Anne first gets to the camp she's a bubbly happy person that all the men like to be around and the beginning of how she changes. Then later in the chapter, O’Brien shares that, “In part, it was her eyes: utterly flat and indifferent, there was no emotion in her stare, no sense of the person behind it. But the grotesque part, he said, was her jewelry. At the girls, throat was a necklace of human tongues(O’Brien 105).” This specific part showed how the war affected someone who was at first a naive bubbly innocent girl that disappeared into a girl who craved the war and the distributing things it held. The seductive allure of war intrigued Mary Anne and was the reason a for her change of character. O'briens structure in this chapter was to show how someone comes to the war and how they may come back darker and