In Tim O’Brien’s book “The Things They Carried” O’Brien throws out the idea of drowning left and right. Typically it is subtle, but the message is still powerful. Through the reoccurring idea of droning, the author is expressing the idea of coming back from war and feeling like you are drowning in the memories of war and never being able to pull yourself out. The first time this idea is expressed in a flashback of Norman Bowker’s before he went off to war. While driving around town unable to find a purpose in life after coming back from the war, Norman is caught daydreaming about the lake and how it took one of his friends. On page 138, O’Brien writes, “And the lake had drowned his friend Max Arnold, keeping him out of the war entirely.” If this was all that was wrote about drowning, this detail would have been irrelevant. However, because the imagery of drowning appears multiple times in the story, this is foreshadowing of things to come and allows these events to stick out in the story. The next time this idea appears it does not come directly out and say it; …show more content…
Both Max Arnold and Kiowa’s deaths were tragic, but were both symbolic. They represented the literal drowning of the innocent. The child or warm-hearted who were loved and still full of hopes. When those two’s bodies were engulfed in either the water or mud, so was every soldiers childhood. The past and their purity are gone and all that is left is a longing for something you can never bring back. Bowker and O’Brien symbolize every man after this point and the different roads they can turn on to. They will eternally always feel the pressure of drowning and never being able to escape the wars. They have to roads they can turn on to: right or left. They can turn right and tough it out and search for clarity, never to actually come, or they can turn left and end the suffering and therefor end the