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Things They Carried Symbols

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The Things They Carried

The story. “The Things They Carried” was about a group of soldiers in the Vietnam war.
The story explained what the soldiers carried both physically, and emotionally. However what truly made this story so great was how the writer used the literary terms of symbol, setting, and theme to convey the meaning of the story.

In the story, “The Things They Carried” symbolism had a big role in how the write gave life to the story. The literary definition of symbol is: An object, person, or action that conveys two meaning. for example one of the symbols is a picture of Martha. The picture of Martha was carried by Lt. Jimmy Cross, and the picture was a symbol of love, as well as how life used to be before Jimmy went to war. The picture also …show more content…

The third literary term that I chose for the story, “The Things They Carried”, is the theme. The literary definition of theme is: The theme of any literary work is the base that acts as a foundation for the entire literary piece. The theme links all aspects of the literary work with one another and is basically the main subject, or what the story is about. In this story I believe that there are several themes that can be taken away from the story. The first theme is the theme of courage. The theme of courage is shown throughout the story, and how all the soldiers or terrified of what could happen, or what is happing to them in the time of war, however none of the soldiers really show how scared they are, and even make jokes about it to deal with the situations. The next theme is burdens. The burdens both physical and emotional are stated throughout the story as well. The physical burden being the actual weight of all the gear that each solder had to

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