Ms. Faulkner
AP Literature
The Things They Carried How does one simply perceive the brutal lifestyle of war? War can truly never be understood unless one witnessed it first-hand. One way to go about explaining war is by telling stories. Stories give the listener a vivid and visual understanding of how the actual lifestyle of war was. Tim O’Brien, the author, writes stories about his personal experiences before, during, and after the war in Vietnam. When he first finds out he was drafted, he had to decide whether to enter the war, go to jail, and run away to Canada. He understands that he doesn’t want to be an embarrassment to his family and friends so he decides to do the honorable thing and report to the war. After some time of thinking, he understood that people who do brave things are often motivated by embarrassment of shame. In the war, he sees soldiers that carry all kinds of weapons, but nothing is more brutal than the emotional load they carry. They carry love, hate, fear, guilt, blame, and dreams. He sees that none of the soldiers, including himself, understood what the purpose of the war truly was. Tim uses a great amount of imagery and dialogue in his stories. He explains how it helps the listener or reader get a great visual understanding of how it was like over there during that time. Not all of them were completely accurate but that was how the stories had to be told in order for people to truly comprehend war. The details of his stories may have been somewhat inaccurate, but the moral of them still applied. He tells different