Tim O'brien example essay topic

The things they carried, by Tim O'brien 'Oh man, you fuck in' trashed the fucker. You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like fuck in's hre dded Wheat. ' I chose to start off my essay with this particular exert from the book because I think that it very much represents the story in itself. Azar said this, after Tim (supposedly) killed a Vietnamese soldier with a hand grenade.

It shows that in times of war, how callous men can become. However, callousness varies, whether they chose to be apathetic, like Tim shows us after his grenade episode. Or whether they choose to be more myopic, as shown through Azar's insensitive actions (i.e. the young lady's tragic loss, the puppy, need I say more? ).

'The things they carried' by Tim O'Brien is a tale, not about war, but rather about war's affect on one's mentality. In 'the things they carried', author Tim O'Brien tries to teach readers that war changes people, by using baggage as a symbol throughout the book. Ultimately, 'the things they carried' is literally built on a foundation of the things they carried. Whether it's the way Jimmy Cross uses the pebble to escape from his duties as a soldier.

Or the way that they all look up to the pantyhose as an almost godly relic. All the way to Norman Bowker finally realizing that courage comes from within, not from winning the Silver Star. These things, made up the soldiers attributes, made up the soldiers' persona, made up the soldier. But they didn't stop at the soldier; certain items characterized all the soldiers as a collective group. It even went as far as to describe an entire group by the things all of them carried, of course being the green berets. There were no single green berets just a group; nobody made an effort to distinguish one from another.

Like the way we make no effort to name each and every cell in our body, they are just smaller pieces that make up one entity. Throughout the entire book, O'Brien makes several references to how normal men can completely change their persona if placed in such an environment. I picked four instances, which truly represented how the mind changes. When Dave Jensen broke lee trunk's nose, he became absolutely paranoid about every aspect of his life. The young lady who began going on ambush's with the green berets also shows how people can be reconditioned by war. Bobby Jorgensen cowardly hesitated and nearly cost Tim his life, but it was later learned that he had matured through experience.

Even the author undergoes an incredible change from the beginning of the story, and through the trials and tribulations, he becomes an almost completely different person. Although there were more situations in which this particular change was exhibited, I feel that these represented it to the most acute degree. Incredible paranoia is one side effect of being surrounded by so much carnage. After Lee Strunk comes back from the undertakings involving his broken nose, Dave Jensen went into a mentality consisting of paranoid lunacy. When you are around a person who has an incredible amount of spite for you, as well as ready access to firearms, moreover nothing to lose, one cannot help but spend their days looking over your shoulder. Living in fear of someone you have crossed, waiting for the day when you will be caught off guard, giving them the chance to exact their horrible revenge.

Jensen just could not take it any more, and he went as far as to break his own nose. It takes a certain type of motivation for a person to sit down and break his own nose. But afterwards, he felt as if a great burden had been lifted off of his shoulders. And that is exactly what the war did, it burdened these men, whether the baggage be physical or emotional, war is a burden that is not only difficult to remove, but difficult to carry. When Mary Anne Bell first arrived in Vietnam, she was just a sweet innocent young lady. She wore cute little clothes, and enjoyed playing in the water and the sand.

When her boyfriend last sees her, she is wearing a necklace made of human tongues. Estimated time of transition: several weeks. When people change like this it can take months, even years, but when immersed in such atmosphere it can speed up or slow down just about anything. In peacetime, a persons life becomes protocol; wake, work, home, TV, bed.

In peacetime, a person's life can also become boring and monotonous. And when a person has so much happening around them, they become incredibly impressionable. This young lady, who has no military training or experience, shows as. Soon enough though, she is running ambushes with one of the most elite military fighting squads in the united states army, she was part of a killing machine. At some point in the story, Tim O'Brien tells us of the time he was, 'shot in the butt'. And of a young inexperienced medic named bobby Jorgensen.

When Tim was 'shot in the butt', bobby feared for his own life, and nearly cost Tim his. In coming to rescue Tim bobby was hesitant because he was worried about being shot himself, he also made no effort to calm Tim down, and Tim suffered because of it. But later on soldiers mentioned that bobby had indeed matured from his once pusillanimous ways. And it is through such experiences like the one that bobby had with Tim, that he learned to become a better medic, a better soldier, and even a better person. Most of this story revolves around experiences that Tim O'Brien has had.

And he certainly has changed from the beginning of the story (speaking chronologically) where he was no more than a scared civilian, who would do anything to escape such a fate as the draft. He would eventually become the war-hardened slightly cocky veteran that he is now. But it is only through his experiences that he would become who he is today. Through all the things he has witnessed. Whether it be watching curt lemon be almost literally 'blown to heaven' to having killed a man and making assumptions about who he truly was. He made not have been most affected by the war, but it was he who was described in the most detail, due to the fact that he was describing in first person.