Things they carried

A detailed Summary of Things they carried

Critical Review: Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried

is not a novel about the Vietnam War. It is a story about the soldiers and their experiences and

emotions that are brought about from the war. O'Brien makes several statements about war

through these dynamic characters. He shows the violent nature of soldiers under the pressures of

war, he makes an effective antiwar statement, and he comments on the reversal of a social

deviation into the norm. By skillfully employing the stylistic technique of specific, conscious

detail selection and utilizing connotative diction, O'Brien thoroughly and convincingly makes

each point. The violent nature that the soldiers acquired during their tour in Vietnam is one of

O'Brien's predominant themes in his novel. By consciously selecting very descriptive details that

reveal the drastic change in manner within the men, O'Brien creates within the reader an

understanding of the effects of war on its participants. One of the soldiers, "Norman Bowler,

otherwise a very gentle person, carried a Thumb. . .The Thumb was dark brown, rubbery to

touch. . . It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen"(13). Bowler had been a

around themselves, instead of the Vietnamese. While also criticizing Americans, he manages to

of the reversal of morals among GIs are effective in presenting O'Brien's views in this, "The Last

leader Lieutenant Cross, is unaffected by the soldiers' blatant use of an illegal substance; he has

portrays their hatred and the severe negative effects the war had on American soldiers in his

account of his plan to leave the country because he did not want to risk losing his life for a cause

reader of war's severely negative effects. In the buffalo story, "We came across a baby water

Approximate Word count = 1404
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: History

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