The Conclusion of The Things They Carried

Clint Kadera

Mrs. Hurlbert

Juniors Honors English

November 25, 2010

The Conclusion of The Things They Carried

                In the final chapter of The Things They Carried, The Lives of the Dead, author Tim O’Brien reminisces of a childhood friend, nine-year-old Linda.  Though “…tempting to dismiss it as a crush, an infatuation of childhood…”, O’Brien explains Linda as more than his first date or first girlfriend, but as his first love.  On Tim and Linda’s initial outing (chaperoned by Tim’s parents), Linda wore a white-tasseled, red hat, the same that “…Santa’s elves wear.”  Linda began to wear the cap to school, dad after day without removing it.  Inevitably, teasing occurred.  This lead to another fifth grader pulling the hat off in class, revealing the “…glossy whiteness of her scalp.”  Linda went on to die from a brain tumor.   Directly after Tim heard about her death, he walked home from school without telling anyone.  Through the living room window, he had a mirage of Linda walking down Main Street alone.  She wore a pink dress and shiny black shoes while playing a game, laughing and running up the empty road, a yellow streetlight illuminating her.  Linda asked Tim why he was so sad, and in response, he told her because she was dead.  Linda nodded, reached out to touch his wrists and said “Timmy, stop crying.  It doesn’t matter.” Following the open casket service Tim attended, he began to have planned, lucid dreams.  Tim would spend time with Linda, asking questions about death.  Still to this day, author Tim O’Brien creates these dreams, dreams of “Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights” of the rink.

                To emphasize visual imagery, the author steadily uses similes.  When describing the stuffed cadaver, the author used the line “The skin at her cheeks was stretched out tight like the rubber skin on a balloon just before it pops open.” This sentence, amongst the entire depiction of the funeral, was the most relatable piece of the book for me.  When I attended my Great Uncle’s funeral, I too believed the body in the casket was not the man I knew.  He was too still, too quiet, too suffocatingly plastic to be my Great Uncle, “It didn’t seem real.”  I swore as well that the moment I turned my back to the body, my Great Uncle would jump out of the casket, grab my shoulders, “…and laugh and yell out my name.”  He never did.  I could picture O’Brien’s entire description. 

                Also in this chapter, O’Brien repeats three key colors: red, yellow, and pink.  Red is the color of Linda’s cap.  A stimulant, red represents both love (between Tim and Linda) and war (the brain tumor).  It’ s the most passionate color.  In China amongst other countries, red paradoxly represents happiness, prosperity, and good luck.  On the same day Tim hears about Linda’s death, he sees a hallucination of her running under a yellow streetlight.  In his dreams he sees her ice-skating under yellow floodlights.  Yellow is warmth and happiness.  The two moments the author uses yellow are two moments of cheerfulness.  During many wars, yellow ribbons are worn by the soldiers’ wives as a sign of hope, praying their husbands would return safe.  On a negative note, in Egypt yellow represented mourning.  In the Middle Ages it signified the dead.  Pink, within United States culture, is a color of youth, of little girls.  In O’Brien’s hallucination of Linda running, she is in a pink dress.  The dress is a paradox.  Linda is in the pink dress, or just in pink.  The saying “in the pink” means someone or something is healthy.  In reality, Linda is dead, but in Tim’s mind, she is alive, in the pink, or healthy. 

The chapter, The Lives of the Dead adds to the theme of Tim O’Brien’s book, that fiction can overcome reality, and more specifically, death.   He addresses (primarily through metaphors) how he himself is a man skimming across the surface of his own history, “…moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when [he does] take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later,” he’s still a man troubled by death.  The stories that help make his dead friends come alive are the stories that help make him stay alive.  Although O’Brien stresses over death, he preaches that death is beautiful, that death is nothing but the stopping of creating new stories about their lives.   O’Brien makes it a point to ask the reader what is alive and what isn’t alive?  He asks what is real and what isn’t real?  The author’s fear is the fear of the unknown, but writing helps him to cope with the thoughts and memories.  O’Brien proves fiction can overcome reality. 

Field of Feces, Fatality, and Fault

Clint Kadera

Mrs. Hurlbert

Juniors Honors English

November 22, 2010

Field of Feces, Fatality, and Fault

Looking for Kiowa’s body, searching for Billie’s picture, and seeking for the narrator’s memories are just three events that Tim O’Brien explains the “…story-truth…” of In The Things They Carried, chapters In the Field and Field Trip.  The first chapter, In the Field, describes the horrendous task of finding a cadaver masked by mud amongst the thigh-deep shit fields of the Song Tra Bong River.   The deceased man, Kiowa, was a “…fine soldier and a fine human being, a devout Baptist.” Taking full responsibility of his death, Lieutenant Cross would not permit “…such a good man…” to be lost under the muck.  By attempting to take all blame, being the leader, learning everyone as individuals, and having the last name of Cross, the author makes clear Lieutenant Cross is the Christ figure.  As the loosely ranked platoon of eighteen searched the field, one young boy stood alone in knee-deep water, reaching down.  In Hebrew, the word for alive, (chai), has a numerical value of 18, which is the same amount of soldiers still in the patrol. 

The night before, the same night Kiowa suffocated under muck, the young boy had been with him, huddled together under ponchos, displaying his picture of his girlfriend to Kiowa with a flashlight.  Within the young boy’s mind, the shooting on their camp from the Vietcong started as a result of his flashlight, acting like a target in the night.  Through the boy’s interpretation, Kiowa’s death had been his fault.  Like Jimmy Cross, as he searched he was “…explaining things to an absent judge,” not attempting to push guilt aside, but to know where he stood on matters.  Surprisingly, he had not been looking for Kiowa within the slime but the picture of his girlfriend, Billie, he had misplaced.  The boy saw the picture as closure.  If he could find the picture, then Kiowa’s death might not seem so painful, that he hadn’t died to see a careless photo.  In an obsessive compulsive, hoarding-like manner, to emphasize the importance of the picture would hopefully weaken the guilt of indirectly killing Kiowa.  Who was this laconic young boy?  Was it Tim O’Brien?  Where is the character now?  Did he ever find the picture?  Would it have mattered? 

When the troop finds Kiowa, the author describes his body as being “…angled steeply into the mud, upside down, like a diver who had plunged headfirst off a high tower.”  The pool in the simile, like most bodies of water in literature, represents the cleansing and rebirth of Azar and Lieutenant Cross.  With every death, Cross grows more and more into a Christ figure.  Azar’s patent, childish affectation was ferreted from the situation, no longer hiding behind jokes and now embracing death for the event it is.

Later on in the book, chapter Field Trip explains of Tim O’Brien and his ten-year-old daughter journeying back to the swampy area.  Though the field was still there, it had not been as he remembered it.  The field was smaller, less menacing, and filled with bright sun.  O’Brien described the situation as “like waking from a summer nap, feeling lazy and sluggish.”  After stripping to his underwear, O’Brien waded in a small stream, near where the corpse was found 20 years ago, placing Kiowa’s moccasins deep underneath the mud forever. 

He later returned to the jeep, meeting eyes and exchanging respect with a farmer fifteen meters up the field, who raised his shovel in the air, “…like a flag…”, metaphorically meaning the closure  and peace of mind the narrator now has after visiting river, feeling something in his heart go shut “…while something else swung open.”  By burying the moccasins, the narrator has buried his guilt.  The muddy water O’Brien waded in symbolized a rebirth, a cleansing time.  The very last line said by O’Brien, “All that’s finished,” not only signifies the end of the war, but the end of his guilt. 

In the bible, fifteen, the same number of meters the farmer and the narrator were apart, is a holy number, due to it being the product of three and five.   Five on its own symbolizes grace, while three symbolizes divine perfection, thus fifteen represents Divine Grace, the perfect moment of no enemies, no war, no guilt, no fear.  O’Brien problems had been resolved.

In a way, O’Brien’s daughter symbolizes the reader.  Even the most sagacious person that’s unexposed to any war may never appreciate and understand a true soldier, the events they’ve watched, the actions they’ve done, the memories they have.  How should O’Brien tell the daughter or the reader?  What words should he use?  What actions should he include?  What feelings should he express?  it’s almost hopeless to attempt injecting the pain, excitement, and vibe a soldier has into the average person’s brain.  Looking for Kiowa’s body, searching for Billie’s picture, and seeking for the narrator’s memories are just three events that Tim O’Brien explains the “…story-truth…” of In The Things They Carried, chapters In the Field and Field Trip.

The Colors of The Things They Carried

Clint Kadera

Mrs. Hurlbert

Juniors Honors English

November 15, 2010

The Colors of The Things They Carried

Purples, blacks, browns, blues, whites, reds, yellows. In The Things They Carried chapters The Man I Killed through Style, author Tim O’Brien utilizes colors, along with other literary devises, to their utmost potential in order to create commanding images and messages.  The reading begins with Kiowa’s vivid description of a man he killed.  Using blunt and direct syntax, seen on pages 126, 127, and 130, much of the chapter’s dialog is made of Kiowa’s talking to the nonresponsive corpse.   O’Brien also chooses to overload the conversations with transition words, most containing the word then.  This forces the reader to think outside of a timeline and more in a sloppy, incorrect chronological order, the same mindset most think in when frantic or hazed.  Throughout the chapter, O’Brien constantly describes the dead man as dreaming of becoming a math teacher, one who enjoyed reading books and was scared of fighting, almost pacifist by nature. 

This directly corresponds with the man’s physical description, being a “…dainty young man of about twenty” and having many shy features, like eyebrows “…thin and arched like a woman’s” and “…fingernails that were clean.”  His hair was black, which represented the mystery of life and what was possible if he had survived the war.  The man also had one eye closed and one eye yellow and red, star-shaped.  The closed eye represents death or ending, with him not able to see his future come true or even begin, while the star-shaped eye represents his goals and dreams of becoming a teacher and peaceful person.  O’Brien punches this obvious symbol into the reader’s head by making it relatable to a common piece of advice: reach for the stars.  By color, the yellow of the star-shaped eye represents happiness, whimsy, and potential.  The red represents deep emotion and strong love.  The once-red blood on the neck becomes purple and black by the end of the chapter.  Black represents mystery and the unknown while dark purple symbolizes Kiowa’s gloom and sadness.  Purple also represents the dead man’s dignity, wisdom, independence, and creation. 

                Directly after The Man I Killed, Tim O’Brien explains the story of the man he himself killed.  Facing the exact same guilt Kiowa faced, O’Brien questioned his decision to kill a pedestrian soldier walking by oblivious to his surroundings.  Similar to Kiowa’s victim, the man killed in Ambush was also a “…short, slender  young man of about twenty.”  Both victims were surrounded by fog, symbolizing Kiowa’s and O’Brien’s evolutions as characters.  Compared to Curt Lemon’s death, O’Brien’s kill was a symbol of war, of “…something fruity and sour.”  Though death is a clear cut ending to man’s known world, every action leads to a reaction and possibly a new, intriguing world for the deceased.  The mystery of one door closing and another opening is disturbingly captivating. 

Also like Lemon’s death, both men were surrounded by white, one by blossoms and one by a puff.  White as a color means simplicity, cleanliness, and re-beginning.  In Heraldry, white represents faith and purity.  The puff, as pertaining to a cloud shape, symbolizes ethereal heights of heaven, a quality of higher truth.  Both men were metaphorically pulled by “…invisible wires” upward.  O’Brien’s kill also had one eye closed, one eye star-shaped, representing unexplored dreams and deaths. 

All three death situations being compared give suggestion to difficult questions.  Is the only way to truly understand the gift of life is to be forced to take someone else’s away?  Would you choose to have a much shorter life to make a direct epiphany in another person’s life?  Would you choose to have have a much shorter life to directly help another person evolve for the far better? 

                Once again, O’Brien uses color to explain a character.  In the chapter Style a young girl with “…black hair and brown skin” is found delightfully dancing outside her burnt-away house, “…eyes half closed, her feet bare.”  Black represents mystery while brown is a nonthreatening color, straight characteristics of the girl’s personality.  After quick inspection, the troop discovers her family, “…dead and badly burned.”  Three humans created the deceased family, two being “…an old woman and a woman whose age was hard to tell.”  The third person was an infant.  By clarifying they’re women and a baby, O’Brien makes it a strong point that the scene isn’t a dangerous one. 

The moment the men pull the dead out of the area, the dancing girl places her hands over her ears, face with a “…dreamy look, quiet and composed.”  Later on, Azar, hiding his true feelings over the situation, does a parody of the young girl’s dance.  Dobbins picked up Azar and took him to a deep well, asking him if he wanted to be dumped in.  Azar said no and in response, Dobbins told him to “dance right.” 

Tim O’Brien suggests a strong message in the passage.  By dancing barefoot, the author suggests that the girl felt every pain possible from her family’s death.  However, by not concentrating on the hurt, placing her hands over her ears so she couldn’t hear, shutting her eyes so she couldn’t see, dancing to the melody of life she chose to dance to, the girl proved she could conquer anything.  She chose to be ecstatic instead of dreadful. 

No matter how difficult the situation, one always has a choice to be happy or sad.  Still, very few choose to view events in this black and white spectrum.  Instead, they decide to feel the stings that the passersby (the soldiers) believe they should feel.  This choice isn’t something a person can fake or put a mask over, as shown by the metaphor of Azar’s dance.  The surrounding world will recognize the laughably-fake and shallow imitation and try to push them down a deep, un-escaping well.  One must “dance right” if they wish to dance at all, as illustrated by the young black haired, brown skinned girl.  In The Things They Carried chapters The Man I Killed through Style, author Tim O’Brien utilizes colors, along with other literary devises, to their utmost potential in order to create vibrant images and messages. 

Metaphors, Oh So Many

Clint Kadera

Mrs. Hurlbert

Juniors Honors English

November 10, 2010

Metaphors, Oh So Many

                A letter to a deceased best-friend’s sister, an ominous mountainous opera, and a “…tall big-boned blonde” are just a few metaphors that author Tim O’Brien explains in The Things they Carried chapters How to Tell a True War Story through Stockings.  The first pages of How to Tell a True War Story introduce a character named Bob Kiley, or Rat.  Within a week after his closest friend dying, Rat chooses to write a “…beautiful fuckin’ letter” to his companion’s sister.  The letter to the sibling reminisces over multiple thrilling and bedlam events the two soldiers experienced together.   To his letdown, “…the dumb cooze never writes back.” 

Not only is How to Tell a True War Story chockfull of explosive dialect, the unanswered letter O’Brien writes about is a direct analogy of might.  Though Rat never received a response from the sister, it wouldn’t have mattered.  By writing, Rat was attempting to gain closure over his friend’s death.  He wanted to recite why Rat and his friend were so close, tell her about “…the good times they had together, how her brother made the war seem almost fun.” Rat almost “…bawls writing it.”  Not once does Rat show any curiosity about the emotional state the sister is in.  Rat’s goal wasn’t attempting to create communication with his best friend’s sibling.  How would she respond to a letter of that type?  With this passage, O’Brien tells the reader that though a person may experience events which never feel fully completed or resolved, one must continue on to create the best future for themselves, instead of dwindling away within the past. 

Later, O’Brien explains of a six-man patrol sent into the mountains on a listening-post operation.  After a few days the troop begins to hear soft music, “…faraway, sort of, but right up close, too.”  Eventually the sound increases into a concert, adding chimes and xylophones.  Naturally, the men become disturbed as they are the only humans anywhere on the mountain.  A cocktail party and chamber music add to the mix.  Finally, a “…terrific mama-san soprano” becomes audible, giving leeway to almost every type of choir imaginable.  The men eventually demand weapons, destroying the mountain itself.  After a few days of blown money, the noises continue, forcing the insane patrol back to base.  As seen on page 74, Tim O’Brien utilizes syntax to simulate the rhythm of music.  While maintaining powerful dialect throughout the story, using phrases and words like “…they’re pretty fried out,” “…real hoity-toity,” and “…strange gook music,” the author develops un-compared audio imagery, as seen on pages 73 through 75.  However, the true mission behind the written story is to convey a message to the reader that a person’s greatest strength is also his greatest weakness.  

In this case, the mountains are a symbol of a secluded, isolated place.  They symbolize loneliness and a difficult mental, emotional, and physical state.  Through ingenious irony, by making the patrol men experts technically on sound and having their downfall be sound, O”Brien points out that characteristics people excel at are the same characteristics people take for granted and as being harmless.  Electricians never expect to die from electrocution.  Taxi drivers never expect to die from a car crash.  Rifling men never expect to die from an errant bullet.  Yet, with the acceptation of natural death, these activities have perhaps the greatest chance of killing that person.  Mankind’s biggest weakness may be believing they are invincible within their own element.

In the chapter Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong a young soldier, Mark Fossie, arranged for his young, blonde girlfriend, currently living in the United States, to come visit him.  With intense white legs and blue eyes, the girlfriend, Marry Anne Bell, had “,,,a complexion like strawberry ice cream.”  Marry was also deeply curious about all things around her, including the troops’ explosives, guns, and hobbies.  Though things started off positively between Fossie and Marry Anne, the two grammar school sweethearts, she began to evolve into a new, different character.  The constant giggling evolved into a thoughtful face, the playful flirting became a compressed body.  She was now “too stiff in places, too firm where the softness used to be.”  One night she went with the quiet and queer Green Bureau unit nearby on a night ambush.  In attempt to prevent further change, Fossie made Marry Anne his fiancé, as always planned by the two, except now, it seemed anything but planned.   One morning Marry Anne was gone.  Though Fossie had expected it to occur eventually, the prediction didn’t help with the pain.  O”Brien personified the grief, saying it “…took him by the throat and squeezed and would not let go.”  About three weeks later, in the midst of night, Fossie heard Marry Anne singing.  After following the noise, he arrived at the Bureau’s tent.  He walked in to see a mirrored, antithesis version of the Marry Anne that Fossie once knew.  Green glowing eyes had replaced Marry’s beautiful blue ones, she held a gun close against her body, a necklace of tongues hung around her neck.  She was different. 

Marry Anne’s new appearance symbolizes many things.  In the middle ages, green was thought to represent calamity and evil.  In western cultures, green is associated with fate, instability, and uncertainty.   A tongue itself is used for communicating, the ability to know when to speak and when not to speak.  Thus the tongue necklace is a symbol of how deep down Fossie knows he has lost Marry Anne, but still feels he should attempt talking her out of her new self.  Fossie can’t do anything and is helpless.  In a way, the tongues are Fossie’s words.  Though centered around Marry Anne, they are dead and have no true purpose or function. 

O’Brien tells the reader that for every action there is a reaction.  One can also always find a way to blame himself for anything.  Though Marry Anne’s transition wasn’t directly Fossie’s fault, he took it as if the occurrence was.  The reader is forced to ponder the possibilities of a Marry Anne that never saw Vietnam, how Fossie and Marry Anne’s “…fine gingerbread house near Lake Erie…” would have been, how their “…three healthy yellow-haired children…” would have been, how they would have grown old together and died “…in each other’s arms and buried in the same walnut casket.”  What would the couple be if she had never seen Vietnam?  So, in the end, a letter to a deceased best-friend’s sister, an ominous mountainous opera, and a “…tall big-boned blonde” are metaphors used by author Tim O’Brien in The Things they Carried chapters How to Tell a True War Story through Stockings.

The Commencement for the Things They Carried

Clint Kadera

Mrs. Hurlburt

Junior Honors

November 1, 2010

The Commencement of The Things They Carried

Throughout Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” the author employs syntax on almost every page.  Few-word sentences are incredibly blunt and make a direct point, like page twenty-one’s “they made themselves laugh,” “they endured,” and page twenty-four’s “He loved her but he hated her,” each summarizing a dramatic time in the men’s lives.  However, with the longer sentences as seen constantly through chapter “Love,” not only is O’Brien able to keep each word’s importance, but also projects a certain story teller vibe, almost like a grandfather is reciting experiences to a grandchild first hand.  With such drawn out sentences, a person can’t pause while reading, like a period would do.  The word flow presents a continuous dialog. 

On page twenty-two, O’Brien uses a metaphor and imagery to portray the jumbo jets that carry injured away from Vietnam as being “a real bird, a big sleek silver bird with feathers and talons and high screeching.”  Flight is also a symbol for escape.  In most soldiers’ eyes, the only way to end the Vietnam War for themselves is to get shot, cut, or killed, with all three options leading to a flight on a plane.  Thoughts aren’t based on arriving back home but just escaping the war, no matter where their next destination leads.  The piece is an analogy of how far too many humans in typical life try to not have problems (war), instead of trying to reach happiness (home) itself directly; they play not to lose, instead of to win.

Later, on page twenty-three, symbolism is used once again through the weather.  There is a steady rain falling representing a cleansing and rebirth of Jimmy Cross as he burned Martha’s letters and photographs at the bottom of his foxhole,  O’Brien goes on to write that “[Jimmy Cross] hated her.  Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love.”  Instead of taking joy in what he loved, the affection for Martha now appears to be a devilish sin for Cross.  Nevertheless, is it still love or just infatuation if one feels hateful about a previous passion?

On page twenty, through diction, author Tim O’Brien explains of a white elephant that the typical soldier must accustom himself to: using “…hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness” of death.  In a scripted play-like manor, men used words “offed, lit up, zapped while zipping” when speaking of dying “…to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself.” Soldiers also kicked corpses, cut off thumbs, and talked grunt lingo.  Not only in this passage does O’Brien enlighten the reader on the army’s habits, but he makes an analogy to life as well.  Many humans within regular life utilize slang words (and actions) in order to hide their fears and doubts.  A one-talent athlete speaks of a career ending injury as a bitch.  An un-excelling math student refers to a problem as being gay.  A dwindling-life drug user states a tremendously deadly substance as ecstasy.  Worries, given that everyone is a victim to them, are perhaps the main contributor to new or new meaning words; Creativity and simplicity are far-away followers.