March Literary Analysis THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

GENERAL
1. Briefly summarize the plot of the novel you read, and explain how the narrative fulfills the author's purpose (based on your well-informed interpretation of same).
The story of The Things They Carried is a narration of the past and present through the eyes of Tim O'Brien; a bleeding-heart liberal who was drafted into the military to fight in Vietnam. He tells the tales of the events that unfolded before him and his fellow soldiers of the Alpha Company Throughout the novel, Tim brings up multiple characters that reoccur in various chapters for various situations. Tim explains what all the characters were feeling and what they were thinking; why certain characters felt guilt or anxiety, why and how they died, and how the war affected them. Every chapter serves a purpose, from explaining how he got into the war in the first place to the images and memories that haunt him. The whole novel is Tim trying to write out his guilt and dark feelings, because writing about them (fellow soldiers, dead friends, victims) helped him stay alive and cope with the true conflict within him; the death of his first love Linda.


2. Succinctly describe the theme of the novel. Avoid cliches.
The theme of The Things They Carried is that life, love, and war provide literal and figurative burdens that one must find the strength to "carry". Each soldier in the novel all carried physical items on their backs while trekking through the jungles of Vietnam. More of a burden than that though, they each carried some sort of emotional baggage that alone was heavier than the guns, ammo, and clothing combined. Dobbins carried his girlfriend’s lucky pantyhose, he believed that he couldn't be hurt while wearing them, even after she ended their relationship. To him, those represented the love and comfort that he longed for him life. Cross carries compasses and maps, those represented the care he had to show for the men he had to lead. The men who survived the things they carried through Vietnam didn't come through unscathed. They men who survived came out of the war with guilt, confusion, and regret. With this theme he hopes for the reader to help carry the burden because the men who suffered need justice, they need to live on because they suffered so much and deserve recognition. Tim O'Brien wants the reader to see the theme and help the characters and himself live on through reading these stories.


3. Describe the author's tone. Include a minimum of three excerpts that illustrate your point(s).
The tone of The Things They Carried is introspective, yet unreliable because the lack of confidence in story telling and memories.


"But listen. Even that story is made up...
'Daddy, tell the truth,' Kathleen can say, 'did you ever kill anybody?' And I can say, honestly, 'Of course not.'
Or I can say, honestly, 'Yes.' (Page 171 - 172)

"In the daylight, maybe, you didn't believe in this stuff. You laughed it off. You made jokes. But at night you turned into a believer: no skeptics in foxholes." (Page 193)

"I'm young and happy. I'll never die. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story." (Page 233)

4. Describe literary elements/techniques you observed that strengthened your understanding of the author's purpose, the text's theme and/or your sense of the tone. For each, please include textual support to help illustrate the point for your readers. (Please include edition and page numbers for easy reference.)
Some literary elements that helped me understand the theme and sense of tone of the novel were the imagery, diction, syntax, characterization, and motif.


IMAGERY:

"He stepped back and shot it through the right front knee. The animal did not make a sound... Rat took careful aim and shot off an ear. He shot off the hindquarters and in the little hump at it's back. He shot it twice in the flanks...shot the mouth away...He shot off the tail. He shot away chunks of meat below the ribs. All around us there was the smell of smoke and filth and deep greenery...Again the animal fell hard and tried to get up...then he shot it in the throat..." (Page 75). This imagery shows that the sorrow that Rat Kiley felt and carried about losing his best friend Curt Lemon developed into demon that fully took over Kiley.

"His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman's, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skill, his forehead was lightly freckled..." (Page 118). Tim can remember the man he killed perfectly, an imaged scarred into his head forever.

"Azar moved to the dike and sat holding his stomach. His face was pale... the men nodded and got out their entrenching tools and began diffing. It was hard, sloppy work. The mud seemed to flow back fast than they could dig, but Kiowa was their friend and they kept at it anyway..." (Page 167). These men had to dig up their friend from a field of feces, a few of them felt guilt, mainly Lieutenant Cross because he stationed them their in the first place. To get rid of this weight they carried for letting their friend Kiowa die, they had to dig him out. They would have done anything under any circumstance to save his dead body and their own psyche's.

DICTION:

"...they carried like freight trains... and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry." (Page 15). They men didn't just carry like humans, they carried like freight trains meant to carry literal tons of cargo. The 'mystery' and 'unknown' were the metaphysical things that the soldiers carried.

"They were just goofing. There was a noise, I suppose, which must've been the detonator, so I glanced behind me and watched Lemon..." (Page 67). With this casual wording of a major event that took place in front of Tim's own eyes, it gives the reader a sense of tone. Tim 'supposed' instead of 'knew for a fact'. Tim guessed that something 'must've' been a detonator instead of saying straight forward that it was the detonator.

"I learned that words makes a difference. It's easier to cope with a kicked bucket than a corpse; if it isn't human, it doesn't matter much if it's dead." (Page 226). The use of language the characters used helped keep more weight off their chests.


SYNTAX:

"Sometimes I'd roam around the base. I'd head down to the wire and stare out at the darkness, out where the war was, and think up ways to make Bobby Jorgenson feel exactly what I felt. I wanted to hurt him." (Page 184). The long sentence was the continuation of one thought which the reader was given time to absorb while reading. With the abrupt stop and new, short sentence that follows, the reader gets the feel that what Tim feels is real and true and he has been thinking about this thought for a long while.

"...He was beyond that. He was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-four years old. He couldn't help it." (Page 11). With these short sentences the reader can see that Tim's point had to be made. Lieutenant Cross (who the quote is about) was a young man in love, and that was all, that was what he carried with him in the war. Because his mind was with Martha on the Jersey shore, other characters were harmed which in turn made him feel guilt.

"That's how I felt - like a civilian - and it made me sad. These guys had been my brothers. We'd loved one another." (Page 185). Short, quick thoughts show the reader that Tim is remembering how he felts and almost saying it for the first time. Spitting it out so he can get past it.


CHARACTERIZATION: Tim O'Brien changed throughout the novel. He went into the war a bleeding-heart liberal student and came out a changed man. Through the stress and guilt he felt (the burdens he carried), Tim had extreme mood and personality changes depending on how far in the war he got into.

"... I had the feeling that I'd slipped out of my own skin, hovering a few feet away while some poor yo-yo with my name and face tried to make his way toward a future he didn't understand and didn't want." (Page 52).

"For all my education, all my fine liberal values, I now felt a deep coldness inside me, something dark and beyond reason." (Page 191).

"There was that coldness inside me. I wasn't myself. I felt hollow and dangerous." (Page 197).


MOTIF: The fear of dying is a motif because of the ending of a human connection that can be felt, not because the person is dead. When a person dies, the worldly connection dies with them, the spark that others can feel because of them dies with them. They become limp, lifeless bug food. Tim understood this, this was one of the burdens he carried with him throughout the novel. It was a major burden the weighed on him that grew and grew as time went on.

"An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading." -Linda (Page 232). She says this after Tim asked her what it was like to be dead. With this idea planted in his mind he had to keep writing and telling stories, to keep him and Linda alive.

"Even then I kept seeing the soldier's body tumbling toward the water, splashing down hard, how inert and heavy it was, how completely dead." (Page 220).

"I wanted something to happen between us, a secret signal of some sort... Everything was quiet... (Page 228)

CHARACTERIZATION
1. Describe two examples of direct characterization and two examples of indirect characterization. Why does the author use both approaches, and to what end (i.e., what is your lasting impression of the character as a result)?

An example of indirect characterization is here from the first story when Lt. Jimmy Cross is opening his letters and hoping for a love letter from his girl. His actions show that he is a hopeful man who tries to remain positive.

"First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending."

Another example of indirect characterization is here from the story SPIN and you can again see how Ted Lavender was a mellow man from what he said.

"Like when Ted Lavender went too heavy on the tranquilizers. "How's the war today?" somebody would say, and Ted Lavender would give a soft, spacey smile and say, "Mellow, man. We got ourselves a nice mellow war today."

2. Does the author's syntax and/or diction change when s/he focuses on character? How? Example(s)?
Tim O'Brien, the author does not change his syntax and diction a lot mainly because he is the speaker throughout the whole story. He talks about others in the somber tone of war and tells the tragic stories with the same amount of respect. Since the stories are being told by someone who was actually participating in these events, they will show the sadness through the words.

3. Is the protagonist static or dynamic? Flat or round? Explain.
The author is a static character as he just tells the vignettes. There is no real problem created and the reader is just supposed to enjoy the stories and think about them.

4. After reading the book did you come away feeling like you'd met a person or read a character? Analyze one textual example that illustrates your reaction.
After reading this book I definitely felt as if I had met the characters in the stories. O'Brien tells the stories on such a personal level and it makes me feel as if I am meeting the characters as he introduces them to the reader. The story is fiction but with very real factual references, the characters were based off of real people.

An example from the text that helped me feel closer to the characters was when the draft noticed came and I was inside O'Briens head with him while he was reading it.

"The draft notice arrived on June 17, 1968. It was a humid afternoon, I remember, cloudy and very quiet, and I'd just come in from a round of golf. My mother and father were having lunch out in the kitchen. I remember opening up the letter, scanning the first few lines, feeling the blood go thick behind my eyes. I remember a sound in my head. It wasn't thinking, just a silent howl. A million things all at once—I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldn't happen. I was above it. I had the world dicked—Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude and president of the student body and a full-ride scholarship for grad studies at Harvard. A mistake, maybe—a foul-up in the paperwork. I was no soldier. I hated Boy Scouts. I hated camping out. I hated dirt and tents and mosquitoes. The sight of blood made me queasy, and I couldn't tolerate authority, and I didn't know a rifle from a slingshot. I was a liberal, for Christ sake: If they needed fresh bodies, why not draft some back-to-the-stone-age hawk? Or some dumb jingo in his hard hat and Bomb Hanoi button, or one of LBJ's pretty daughters, or Westmoreland's whole handsome family—nephews and nieces and baby grandson. There should be a law, I thought. If you support a war, if you think it's worth the price, that's fine, but you have to put your own precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook up with an infantry unit and help spill the blood. And you have to bring along your wife, or your kids, or your lover. A law, I thought."