Things They Carried
Essays

Tim O'Brien's 1990 collection of war stories "The Things They Carried" is focused on putting across a realistic image of warfare as seen from a first-person perspective. Even with the fact that the writer obviously wants readers to be severely influenced as a result of reading the book, he does not hesitate to introduce fictional passages in an attempt to make it easier for someone to read the book. It actually appears that O'Brien sees romanticism in a place where most people fail to see it and wants to take advantage of the fact that he is basically writing a historical account. This demonstrates that he considers that it would be impossible for someone to express an objective opinion concerning warfare as long as the respective individual experienced it directly.

Mary Anne is significant to the novel because O'Brien demonstrates how the war impacts more than soliders. In the "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," Mary Anne is the epitome of the all- American girl.

Love, Death, Pathos and Irony within Tim O'Brien's Short Story "The Things They Carried"

While I have mostly read books for entertainment reasons, I can remember one that a friend told me about that I read out of curiosity. This curiosity made me stop and think about a life that was so different from mine.

¶ … Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien [...]'s antiwar position and how this position relates to the era of unrest in the United States over the Vietnam War. The era of the Vietnam War was a difficult time in American…

Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien is a story about a group of novice soldiers who are performing their tour of duty in Vietnam. According to Gene Lyons, this book is a blend of traditional and untraditional forms -- a…

In his thought-provoking novel about the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien redefines the traditional concept of war as an honorable pursuit. In doing so, he explodes the myth about war being even…

In his book, The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien is allowing the reader to see the negative effects war has on people, especially on soldiers. Through a variety of short stories focused primarily on the Vietnam war,…