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Things They Carried By Tim O Brien: An Analysis

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In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien presents the truth of war by using the recurring image of the physical objects each soldier carries to and from the war. While they all carry heavy baggage, they also carry emotional baggage, made up of grief, love and guilt. O’Brien emphasizes on the tangible and intangible objects each soldier brings to the war. Each soldier's physical burden draws attention to their emotional burden. Even after the war, many of the soldiers can still hear the choppers in the background along with the unremovable baggage. O’Briens tells the stories of many of the honorable soldiers such as Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, and his own firsthand experiences during the war; his poetic realism and comic fantasy illuminate the raw and gruesome reality of war.
Lieutenant Jimmy Cross exemplifies the role of a leader; he comes across grief, love, and guilt throughout the novel. “As a first lieutenant and platoon leader, Jimmy Cross carries a compass, maps, code books, binoculars, and a .45-caliber pistol that …show more content…
He makes his readers to visualise the reality of war and the truth in it. They all go to the war with just physical and emotional baggages, but those that survive bring back guilt from war. Tim 0’Brien writes this story the things they carried to save himself from the guilt, nightmares, and anxiety reactions he faces after the war. His storytelling becomes a memory and a past. In his story, O’Brien seems to be playing with the truth and he has been doing that since the death of Linda. However, he expresses an emotional truth as he wants us “ to feel what (He) felt,to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (171), --the soldiers coming back from the war know the truth about the war that civilians do not know--. Tim O’Brien wants his readers to know what the truth feels like and what actually

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