The Things the Carried Essay

Jiani Yu

8/25/14

AP Lit Per.5

The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried is a typical metafiction by Tim O’Brien written surrounding a platoon of American forces’ life in the Vietnam War. The author experiences first hand to tell us the cruelty of a war and the difficulty of living. It shows his struggles between humanity and ruin. He uses combinations to express his friends’ and his different view of the world during the war and tells us the memory we had will go along with us becomes the sign when we look back at the world.

A period of memory can effect a person’s life in a long and deep term. Tim O’Brien’s comrade-in-arms, Norman Bowker, could not integrate into a normal life after the war, could not find the meaning of life; in his letter to Tim O’Brien, he said,“ There’s no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean. It’s almost like I got killed over in Nam...Hard to describe. That night when Kiowa got wasted, I sort of sank down into the sewage with him...Feels like I’m still in deep shit.”(O’Brien 150) Eight month after, Norman Bowker committed suicide in the gym changing room of his hometown. Without any last words. This brought me back in the beginning of the book, O’Brien was telling about the “hump” they carried——P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, photos, The Bible, chewing gum, C rations——they carried based on their jobs and terrain, their missions, and superstition...They carried this land of Vietnam, carried exhaustion; they carried the skies, and the mud that covered their faces and shoes. Damp, rainy, fungal, and decayed smell. Once they put it on their back, they could never take it off.

Under O’Brien’s words now, what the soldiers carried was not only their supplies, their memories too. Or in this case we can say, the history. The memories of their friends’ deaths, the people they had killed, the war life they’d experienced; the...