Things They Carried
Essays

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.

¶ … 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…

¶ … 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…

The most shocking aspects of the novel, The Things They Carried, are the graphic descriptions and the striking honesty with which Tim O'Brien employs to describe the devastating effects of war.

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,…