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Vietnam In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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After a soldier goes to war, the psychological and physical hardships that these men sustain continue to define them throughout their lives. Those who survive often carry a great amount of remorse, despair, and confusion because of what occurred. Many of them struggle to cope with the effects, not only immediate, but long-term as well. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a novel about O’Brien experience in the Vietnam war. He writes this novel behind the effects and aftermath of the Vietnam war. Through his stories, O’Brien doesn’t say outright: “War is bad” or “War is good,” he simply tells the truth. His painfully blunt manner of writing holds no rose-colored lenses over reader’s eyes, regarding any subject. O’Brien tackles viewpoints from many characters in The Things They Carried to better display the experiences of the individual in Vietnam. Though these characters all have different experiences, different backstories, and all behave in different ways, they all share the struggle of the soul at war. O’Brien uses various …show more content…

One example is when O'Brien tells the super-short true war story about the guy who unnecessarily jumped on a mine for his friends in "How to Tell a True War Story," and all the soldiers have a brief and hilarious conversation in the time between the mine going off and them actually becoming dead. Another example is when O'Brien and Azar play the horrible prank on Bobby Jorgenson in "The Ghost Soldiers" and O'Brien's spirit lifts out of his body to become one with the war.“I was the land itself… I was the beast on their lips—I was Nam—the horror, the war.”( O’Brien 138’). Obviously, it would be impossible for O'Brien's spirit to jump out of his body and fuse with the land and the war. Magical realism is used here to make O'Brien's descent into savagery more tangible—it makes the physical world resemble the emotional

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