The Things They Carried by Tim O'brien
by Barry Wright
Essay: The Things They Carried by Tim O'brien
Pages: 10
Rating: 3 stars
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Tim O’Brien wrote the novel The Things They Carried in 1990, twenty years after the war in Vietnam.In the
novel,Obrien takes us through the life of many soliders by telling stories that do not go in chronical order. In
doing so we get to see the physical and mental things the soldiers carry throughout the war in Vietnam.Yet the
novel is more than just a description of a particular war. In the things they carried Tim O’Brien develops the
characters in the book slowly, to show the gradual effect war has on a person. O’Brien shows this by exploring the
life of Henry Dobbins, and Norman Bowker.
Anger can be a cover up for guilt, shame, and vulnerability in the book O’Brien shows us these parts of Henry
Dobbins. O’Brien starts Henry Dobbins of as the tough guy of the group, but gradually we get to see the other
side of Henry Dobbins. In addition we see this in the first chapter “As a big man, therefore a machine gunner
Henry Dobbins carried the M-60, which weighed 23 pounds unloaded, but which was almost always loaded
“(O'Brien.5). In this first encounter O’Briens letting you know the physical strength that Dobbins had. Him being
the strongest, tallest, and most feared of the whole group. In the next couple of chapters O’Brien doesn’t really
mention nor talk about Dobbins in depth. Then all of sudden in the 10th chapter of the book “stockings” O'Brien
gives us a whole chapter about Dobbins. In stockings O’Brien says that Dobbins is the epitmy of America at the
time of the Vietnam war. “big and strong, full of good intentions a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but
always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness
and hard labor “(O'Brien.13). O’Brien ways...