Freedom in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

Generally acknowledged as one of the most preeminent pieces of Vietnam War Literature, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried portrays the raw and sincere image of war through short linked stories completely refrained from political aspects. Although there is no defined storyline in the book, it is compensated by the impact of moral dilemmas that the characters of each short story face. Furthermore, the stories are connected by a thread of characters’ small items that they carried to remind them about past life. This essay will analyze the theme of freedom in O’Brien’s work.

The sequence that stands out the most for a reader is the freedom birds’ metaphor. Freedom birds, in this case, were the choppers that returned service members to the U.S. The author depicts how at night, the soldiers were thinking of a freedom bird, emphasizing how they were almost dreaming but could not let themselves do it due to the guilt for the comrades. Although the freedom bird is an aircraft, the author illustrates how the bird is a big, sleek silver bird with feathers and talons and high screeching; it almost looked real to the soldiers’ eyes (O’Brien 22).

Just like birds that freely flew in the skies, the soldiers on board the choppers were free from burdens of war, from duties, from “gravity and mortification and global entanglements” (O’Brien 22). Moreover, it might not be obvious, but the author subsequently reminds the reader how the birds of freedom take the servicemen back to the real freedom – to the land of farms and great sleeping cities and highways and the golden arches of McDonald’s – America.

Since the freedom theme appears directly only once in the whole book, the reader is left by the author in a longing melancholic mood. It almost feels that just like the soldiers that felt guilty about dreaming about silver birds of freedom, the reader has to fully immerse in the atrocities of war. The birds of freedom connect readers to the real world outside of war and make the reader appreciate freedom and peace.

Work Cited

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

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StudyCorgi. "Freedom in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried." November 30, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/freedom-in-tim-obriens-the-things-they-carried/.

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StudyCorgi. 2022. "Freedom in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried." November 30, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/freedom-in-tim-obriens-the-things-they-carried/.

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