Tim O’Brien is an American writer depicting the war of the USA in Vietnam and its influence on the American soldiers. Tim O’Brien was born in Austin, the State of Minnesota, on October 1, 1946. When Tim was twelve years old, his family moved to Worthington. The impressions about this city made a great impact on the O’Brien’s imagination and promoted his formation as a writer. The events of the novel “The Things They Carried” take place in Worthington. The novel was published in 1990, but is still very popular. The author could vividly present not only the events of the war, but also the feelings and emotions of the soldiers, who sacrificed their lives for the future peace of the whole nation.
“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (O’Brien: 1998).
The book is a vivid example of what war makes not only to people but to the whole generations of young guys - the color of the nation. The hostilities erase the souls of people by their moderate, exact, and imperious movements, sending them from the normal happy life to the abyss of the oblivion in violence. Each page represents people, who put their destinies in the military forcemeat of explosions and fire for the elimination of the imaginary opponent. The author speaks of all these events by the poetic, tough and humane language - in the best traditions of the American literature.
“Throughout the story, O’Brien alternates between narrative passages and simple descriptions of the items that the soldiers are carrying. This fragmentation brings focus to the things the men are carrying, both tangible and intangible, without downplaying the narration” (Voegele: n.d.).
Tim O’Brien somehow describes the recurrence of the thoughts of soldiers in “The Things They Carried”. Having read the novel, I have a lot of cyclic thoughts which go by spirals, coming nearer to the inevitable end. Any fine detail again and again pushes me in the same track - a T-shirt of the meeting half-way young man, or someone’s note about a new article in the newspaper. Like the pebble under my tongue, presented by the girlfriend of the soldier Jimmy Cross, the whole world gives the facts, which indirectly prove my fantasies about the awful Vietnamese War.
Works Cited
O’Brien, T. (1998). “The Things They Carried”. Broadway. 246 p.
Voegele, J. (n.d). “Thoughts of The Things They Carried”. Available at: http://www.jvoegele.com/essays/things.html
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