Steinbeck wants the reader to understand the harsh and difficult living conditions the soldiers are living in. Also, Steinbeck wants the reader to feel the emotion and physical pain the soldiers are feeling, “Under extended bombardment…the eardrums are tortured by the blast…your skin feels thick and insensitive. There’s a salty taste in your mouth. A hard, painful knot is in your stomach with undigested food…This is how you feel just after a few days of constant firing.” Steinbeck’s writes such a strong description that the reader can fully understand and even feel the pain the soldiers feel. The essay “Why Soldiers Won’t Talk,” is marked by a clear narrative description of what war is truly like and gives the reader a strong sense of perspective.
His love for her was also a huge distraction from what truly was important. Lieutenant Cross shows shame and fear. His love for Martha distracted him so much that Ted Lavender, a soldier in his platoon, died under his watch. O’Brien states, “He felt shame. He hated himself.
“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, is a short story about a group of men serving in the Vietnam War. These men are all carrying different items aside from the usual necessities needed while in combat. The items they are carrying are personal effects, and gives insight on how their lives could lead if they are back home. Lieutenant Cross’s personal items however, may be the reason members of his platoon are dying. His obsession of the relationship he desires to have with Martha is causing him to lose focus.
You were there—you can tell it” (O’Brien, 151). The fact that Bowker chooses Kiowa’s death in the field, over all of the other deaths that he had witnessed, shows that Kiowa’s death particularly scarred him. This is evident by the fact that although Bowker wants to talk about what he witnessed and what actions he performed in the war, he cannot because his emotional scars overbear his ability to explain his physical scars. Bowker also shows his shame after asking that O’Brien keeps him
We explore how retelling the stories bring up the pain from war experience, and it lets the soldiers work through it after the war had ended. The protagonist is unable to tell his war experiences and therefore drives silently around; this lack of audience prevents him from arriving at a similar understanding. Norman Bower is finding himself at a loss, he comes home to nothing, his friends are all dead, his girlfriend is married and he has nobody to share his wartime stories with. The structural framework that the narrator is represented in is; that his life goes in circles, he is constantly thinking about the traumatizing experiences the
When his soldier Ted Lavender died all he could do was cry and blame himself for his death, “He felt shame. He hated himself.... this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of war.” (O’Brien, The Things They Carried 42) but he didn’t let that very heart-wrenching emotion of feeling responsible for someone’s death cloud his judgment or cause him to take his job lightly. Towards the end of the story he stepped up, over-coming the guilt he felt after the death of Ted Lavender. Learning from his mistakes and changing the way he lead his platoon “He would not tolerate laxity. He would show strength, distancing himself.” (O’Brien, The Things They Carried 100) He showed courage while seeing the bigger picture telling himself “that his obligation was not to be loved but to lead.” (O’Brien, The Things They Carried 101) Masculinity is very apparent in this platoon.
An example of this is conflict. Gene’s conflict in this chapter is self versus self because the man who was stalked down in the middle of a field haunts him to this day. When he finds this man, the man was cut open with maggots eating his rotting organs and he was begging for Gene to kill him because he was in so much pain and he knew that he was going to die anyway. Gene struggle with his thoughts about what he should do, until he realized there was no way this man could live, which led Gene to shoot the man in the head so the man would not have to suffer more before he died. This memory has haunted him the rest of his life Gene said.
130). By emphasizing the death of this man consistently throughout the chapter, it pin point the agony he felt once he killed basically a man who was not fit for war. Through the constant descriptions of the dead body, it shows the emotional truth behind the feeling of killing a human being and from that readers can understand the anguish of taking the life of another person. These soldiers also had to endure killing people “because they were embarrassed not to” and the men had to sacrifice themselves so “they died so as not to die of embarrassment” (21). In “The Things They Carried” chapter, O’Brien goes in to great detail to tell every little thing each soldier carried and a major thing they carried was the feeling of honor and to die a man.
The emotion that probably weights the most on these men is fear. This fear comes from many sources. The men are constantly haunted by the fear that they may die. Ted Lavender’s death and how the men react to it show it is impact on the soldiers. Kiowa expresses the sense of weight that the threat of death has on the men when he describes Labander’s death, “Boom Down, he said.
Joshua Wiggs Mr. Wellen English 3 18 November 2012 The Effects of War There are men dying today that do not even know what they are fighting for or why. Fighting for your country is an honorable thing but the government officials sitting behind their desks do not understand the sacrifices like the soldiers do. In the novel Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, the main character Joe Bonham is faced with the grim reality of suffering the effects of war. He is in critical condition in the begging of the book and is left with no limbs, deaf, blind, and mute. Throughout the book he continually tries to fight the pain of the lonely feeling.