Things They Carried Tim O'Brian's Book Review

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The audience has the feeling that O'Brian is presenting them with significant and personal stories from his life. This slowly but surely makes readers feel that they too are connected to the war and to the narrator.

It sometimes seems that O'Brian also addresses present day issues in the book, not just happenings from the war. The bond between him and the audience is strengthened through this technique because people become aware that there is not much difference between themselves and the author, given that they too are against immoral wars. People are drawn into O'Brian's game and start to identify with the writer, since the fact that they believe to think similarly to him makes them easier to influence as the book's action progresses. At some point in the book, most readers are liable to abandon any previous convictions they had in regard to the Vietnam War in order to replace them with O'Brian's view.

The author relates to his guilt throughout the novel, insisting that one should not feel directly guilty for an unfortunate incident from the war, as it can easily be motivated through placing the blame on something or someone else. Of course, this does little to help the guilty individual in their later lives, but is essential on the battlefield. Again, the writer wants the audience to identify with him, as he is aware that it is typical for all people to be reluctant to accept that they are responsible for an ill-fated event. Just as most of O'Brian's companions did at war, people generally prefer to motivate their faults by claiming that they are innocent and that it is because of inopportune circumstances that bad things happen.

In his attempt to present the war differently from how it happened and from how people normally like to picture it, O'Brian wrote about the event's great complexity.

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His version of the war is horrifying, but it is also his account of how it happened and one understands that war is far more elaborate than the masses think it is, as it involves numerous features that would make even the most ardent war enthusiast feel that it is immoral to support the concept of war, regardless of the motives it has. In Brian's opinion, war is everything and nothing people believe it is, as it is "mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead" (O'Brian, 80). It is unlikely that the largest part of O'Brian's readers experienced war directly. Even with that, the audience is likely to feel that it learnt more about war by the end of the book, and that the media does little to replicate the emotions and the horror of warfare.

From O'Brian's standpoint, a story is not necessarily sending the message it is supposed to send if it is not told properly. For him, truth does not necessarily have to include reality; with all that it has to do in order to seem truthful is to appeal the audience's heart. Readers learn that war changes a person, making it impossible for him or her to be able to return to their previous activities and pretend that they did not undergo warfare.

The book is extremely useful in studying the Vietnam War, even if it does not always present actual facts. The general impression left by the book is that war is immoral and that it is not important if one chooses to bring forward reality or fiction in order to make people realize this.

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