Things They Carried: Things They Carry Into Their Lives After War
The psychological consequences of war, of fighting in a war, of eating and sleeping in a "war zone," are not merely limited to the implications of witnessing and partaking in death; war deeply influences the mental attitudes of those involved because of the organizational framework of power and authority that soldiers are subject to. The common assumption is that soldiers' troubles coping with war are somehow linked to the extraordinary violence that conflict entails. However, significant trauma often stems from the apparently irrational framework soldiers are asked to operate under. The novel The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien reflects the fact that the lens through which soldiers view war-as they are in it and afterwards-is necessarily attuned to the way in which the military is structured; its seeming randomness and often nonsensical consequences are not overlooked by the individual soldier, and contribute to his fundamental troubles coping with combat. The military dogmas and norms express themselves in unique ways, contributing to the psychological maladies prevalent in ordinary soldiers. Fundamentally, this is what the symbolism within the novel aims to demonstrate: the intimate relationship between suffering and respons
"For instance, I want to tell you this: twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough. I remember his face, which was not a pretty face, because his jaw was in his throat, and I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief. I blamed myself. And rightly so, because I was present. But listen. Even that story is made up." (O'Brien, 179). This symbolic story, however, takes on additional meaning when O'Brien grapples with how he should package it when relaying it to his impressionable young daughter, Kathleen. Kathleen represents another significant symbol to O'Brien's story: she is the stepping stone between the story-teller, O'Brien, and the audience. O'Brien is only able to successfully convey to her the physical realities of the war-what the land was like, what he saw, the objects he carried-and not the emotional significance. Accordingly, The Things They Carried is an attempt to bridge this gap in order to express that what these soldiers carried with them to Vietnam were not merely the weapons and equipment of warfare, and they did not merely do or not do specific things, but that the psychological and moral burdens that accompanied them were even more a part of their reality than what objective "truth" could ever tell. O'Brien's point is this: these fictional tales somehow capture more of the truth because they more accurately depict the truth of emotion, which is fundamentally
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Approximate Word count = 1022
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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