The Things They Carried is a book that consists of fictional stories about soldiers’ experience during the war in Vietnam. The writer reflects on his participation in the military conflict by using a fictional hero – Tim O’Brien. Through storytelling, the author manages to explore his own feelings to convey the message he finds essential. He wants the reader to critically assess the stories to find the truth. This paper presents an analysis of rhetorical tools and strategies employed by O’Brien in his work.
The writer uses a lot of metaphors and symbols to address the problems soldiers faced. For example, he describes a sewage field in “Speaking of Courage” and “In the Field” to present the moral state of people at war. In “Speaking of Courage,” Norman Bowker drives around the lake without stopping recalling the death of a Native American Kiowa (O’Brien 120). He drowned in the sewage field, representing the symbol of an American dignity lost forever. The lake in this episode also depicts deep-buried emotions Norman is not able to share with anyone. In “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” the character of Mary Anne displays the arrogance of the American society toward the war. O’Brien stresses that “the war intrigued her. The land, too, and the mystery.” (85). She treats her trip as a holiday, denying the brutal truth.
Moreover, O’Brien operates with sensory details and imagery to create a sense of reality for a reader. “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman’s…” (O’Brien 110). The author portrays the devastation of the war while contrasting a mutilated human body and a butterfly sitting on a killed solder chin. This imagery adds vividness and attracts readers’ attention to the sorrows of those affected at war.
O’Brien utilizes the power of contrasting via similes; for instance, he compares troopers to mules and freight trains because they had to carry a lot of equipment (O’Brien 23). Soldiers feel not only the emotional burden but the physical one too. In addition, the author talks about strawberry ice-cream when describing Marie Anne. The strawberry ice-cream, in this case, is a symbol of a peaceful life that has been set aside. Similes create a feeling of despair and missed opportunities.
The writer explores the topic of fear that grows steadily inside every character. In the story “On the Rainy River,” the fictional hero Tim admits that the fear is spreading inside him like a weed (O’Brien 44). This anxiety is caused by the need to kill another human being. Throughout the book, soldiers fail to comprehend the unknown, and their horror is becoming an “unnaturally powerful force” (Hansen 54). O’Brien elaborates on the issue by mentioning that “we were fighting forces that did not obey the laws of twentieth-century science.” (O’Brien 175). It is clear that foreign land amplifies worries and makes people feel insecure.
O’Brien aims to blur the boundaries between fiction and real facts in order to focus on storytelling. His intention is to establish the bond between characters and readers. O’Brien’s rhetorical strategies let veterans speak and convey the painful experience they have lived through. Step by step, readers can find out that this book is not about heroism or glory but the inconvenient truth about the war in Vietnam.
Works Cited
Hansen, McKay. “The Star-Spangled Banshee: Fear of the Unknown in the Things They Carried.” A Journal of Literary Criticism, vol. 10, no. 1, 2017, pp. 51-63.
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Houghton Mifflin, 2009.