Stories One Person example essay topic
505 words
"The Things They Carried is more than 'another' book about Vietnam... It is a master stroke of form and imagery... The Things They Carried is about life, about men who fought and die, about buddies, and about a lost innocence that might be recaptured through the memory of stories. O'Brien tells us these stories because he must. He tells them as they have never been told before... If Cacciato was the book about Vietnam, then this is the book about surviving it". -Richmond Times-Dispatch I strongly agree with this critic. The book was very descriptive and it made you feel like you were there. When you read you feel the emotions go through you as if you were a soldier with him. Especially the stories like of when Kiowa died, that was I believe the one piece of the story that made you feel the effect of it. It gives you a great idea and sense of the Vietnam War.
The soldiers themselves did not know what they were fighting for. Knowing this but still fighting for whatever reason they had. Such as not being a coward, fighting for the country and being patriotic. How they each had there own motives for getting through all of it.
This ranged from the necessities to the oddest things you can think of like stockings. It gives you a real image of what the men went through and life after the war. How it all changed them and the purpose they felt they had in life after it. When the soldier at the end of the book wanted O'Brien to write a story about him and how he felt his life was useless and a waste, so he hung himself. He said that even though he survived the war it was as if he had died in it. It wasn't always about war; it was about the relationship the soldiers shared with each other.
Having different unique personalities and special attributes about themselves that distinguish one from another. Like the stories one person would tell and most of the story wasn't true but they listened anyway. Or the jokes that another person made about others dying. The soldiers there would just live day by day not knowing what was going to happen next and not really caring either to a certain extent. But when you are pulled from it, like when O'Brien was when he was shot, that relationship that was once there no longer exists. The story is from his memories and experience in the war so no one can say that the stories are false, because those are his accounts of it and his own experience incorporated within it.
This is one of the best books I have ever read, being about a war or not, there is such a simplicity to it but yet it is so deep..
