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Things They Carried Response Essay

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Tim O 'Brien has written numerous amounts of great well critiqued stories that make your mind think, ‘The Things They Carried," was another one of these stories. At first seemed to be just another war story. As I started reading I thought, “hmmm, maybe this won’t be too confusing”, boy was I mistaking. I started this story and was having troubles wrapping my mind around what was going on with all the jumping around, however after I got into the story further I started actually finding some interest in what was going on. “The Things They Carried”, as a title told you how the story was going to take shape and the author literally goes into details of the things the lieutenant and privates carried. While I was reading the story a few questions that kept running through my mind was why in the world is O’Brien jumping around between real-life and daydreams and also why was he giving so much detail in what they carried. One of my thoughts was maybe he was trying to give the reader the idea of not only the physical weight but also the amount of psychological weight a soldier carries. I think that Tim O 'Brien does a very good job at describing in detail all of the information about how much mental weight a soldier actually carries that makes me feel like I’m actually in the story. Mr. O’Brien makes …show more content…

My other question was, why did he go in so much detail on what they carried? Was that all they carried or was there more? I was reading, I noticed that Tim O’Brien did leave hints in the story about the variety of the things that they were carrying. Phrases such as "They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear," "They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it", "They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die", these phrases basically told me that yes, they were carrying tangible items that O’Brien spent most of his time describing, but that’s not what he wanted you as a reader to focus

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