Thesis For The Things They Carried

He was in so much shock from it he could not stop telling the story. He is coping with the death by repeating what he saw until he accepts that he died. He writes about how the soldiers felt during the war by saying, “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried

Death is something that occurs often in a war due to the violence and dangerous areas. Everyone takes on the thought of someone dying in different ways, whether they maintained a close relationship with the person or not guilt could become an instant reaction of the persons' death because of a feeling of maybe being responsible for the death that occurred. The thought of maybe being responsible for one of the soldiers that you have spent day night serving with could leave an enormous amount of guilt in one person. When witnessing a death or anything traumatic it is easy to blame someone else or even yourself for the tragic accident. Multiple characters in the book The Things They Carried demonstrated the guilt and responsibility of another

Futility means pointlessness or uselessness. Futility reflects the changing mood of the soldiers because they witness each soldier being killed and the mourning of death. The soldiers experience a good persona when they are enlisted for the war as they are seen as heroic and that they are noble for serving their country but then their personas decrease as they realise that its more difficult

. .” (15) As soon as Lavender falls, they all seem to go berserk. It almost seems that, due to his death, Lavender’s comrades are moved with intense sadness and rage, causing them to wreck havoc across Vietnam. This would be a completely response for any soldier—but it’s not the text’s deepest meaning. If readers take one step further, they might discover that the driving cause of these postmortem actions was not Lavender’s death.

The extreme sadness faced by Remarque, inspired him to communicate to readers the strong brother-like bond between comrades, and the empty, hopeless feelings which accompany a death of a comrade which soldiers are supposed to simply except rather than grieve. Finally, the intentional actions of Remarque when composing the conclusion to his novel strongly portray his overall goal of communicating to his audience, that there are no true survivors of an atrocities such as World War 1, the severe psychological impacts on every soldier, including himself, are crushing and the weight of war was too much to bare by a young

During war, as seen in We Were Soldiers a soldier can see some very disturbing things. It is these things, such as seeing a close friend get shot, killed or blown up that can cause severe mental trauma. The way the American soldiers always took care of their own, while heroic, was costly. The American motto is “No man left behind”, this means that no matter what shape the soldier is in, his body will not be left where he died. Seeing someone get shot, and then trying to recover him while being shot at, or holding the injured soldier as he’s bleeding to death, will cause the memories to be ingrained in a soldier 's mind for the rest of his life.

There are moral and honorable acts of war but often those must be ignored for the country to win, yet another reason why it destroys those who fight on the front lines. They are desensitized to death and brutal acts of war, the killing actively kills the innocence they have as people. If these men are not outright wounded then they come home, different people. The massive cost in the lives of those who fight in the war is evident by this. They either die the hero or live long enough to see themselves become unrecognizable to their loved ones and

While he did not lose his friends in actual combat, the same feelings of loss and deep sadness would be provoked. This shows the psychological weight that war and events related to it bore down on the veteran. Menelaos was no longer able to live in the mental peace he could have lived in before the war. The immense trauma and anguish caused by having his friends taken away from him as a result of war left a terrible impression on Menelaos that did not fade. Not only does war affect the companions of those lost, but it much more directly affects families.

This chapter “The Ghost Soldiers”, showed us how Tim O’Brien and the other soldiers were dealing with the war both physically and psychologically. It also shows us how the Tim O'Brien behaved and felt when he was shot, wounded and had a bacteria infection on his butt and how the war changed the way he thought, and viewed the other soldiers around him. This chapter also contain a lot of psychological lens. From the way Tim O’Brien felt when he was shot and separated from his unit to a new unit to when he wanted revenge on Bobby Jorgenson for almost “killing” him. The chapter also showed how the war shaped and changed the way Tim O’Brien thought and dealt with things.

Nouwen blames this hopelessness that individuals feel in this life to a fear of death, a fear of life, and what he calls “the impersonal milieu”. Nouwen uses the story of a man who has fallen ill to describe the impersonal milieu: Suddenly this tough man who had always maintained his own independence through hard manual labor found himself the passive victim of many people and operations that were totally alien to him… An anonymous group of “they” people had taken over (60). As simple as it sounds, personal concern is the antidote that Nouwen provides for the impersonal milieu. It has amazed me at times in my ministry that the most significant things are often the simple gestures of asking “how are you?” “What’s going on with you?” “What’s wrong?” and then genuinely offering myself to listen to the response. This is a day to day act of giving ourselves for others.