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The Things They Carried Theme Analysis

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“They shared the weight of memory, They took up what others could no longer bear.” Tim O’Brien in his book, “The Things They Carried,” portrays the theme of the story through the painful memory of himself as well as his fellow comrades; before, in, and after the Vietnam war. “He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead.” Here, through this memory of Jimmy Cross that he took along with him to the war, the theme [Guilt and Shame] that basically gives the story more than half of its meaning as a whole was portrayed. He blamed himself for the death of Lavender; he thought that him just loving Martha causes his distraction which causes Lavender’s death, which to me , is a partial truth. Now, he would have to carry the guilt “like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war,” and probably for the test of his life. Another theme portrayed in this story is ‘Respect and Reputation.’ The soldiers at war are not there because they want to, but “rather, they were too frightened to be cowards”[pg 77]. Sometimes, the soldiers have to do things they will normally not do because they do not want to be seen as being weak by their friends and family and particularly by themselves. Such is the case of …show more content…
I was a coward. I went to the war” [p 79]. The irony in this quote by Tim himself took me quite a while to assimilate the message in it. Earlier in the story, it’s all been the talk of how they have all come to the war because they do not want to be seen as cowards; now, he is claiming that going to war is being a coward. From my understanding of this story, I could infer from the quote that being a coward is not doing what people does not want you to do, but doing what you, yourself, does not want to do. Tim, because he does not want to bring shame upon his family, he went to fight a war he was “too good” and “ too smart”

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