is the book told in first person or third person? how does this affect the seeming reliability of the narrative? the things they carried is narrated, alternately, in third person and first person. The first person i narratives feel trustworthy and personal, but o 39 brien warns the reader against this very pitfall. He writes that war stories should always be mistrusted, no matter who is telling them. what is the role of shame in the soldiers 39 lives? does shame propel them to heroism or stupidity? shame is the reason that tim o 39 brien decided to go to vietnam. It is the one thing that keeps them from shooting themselves in the foot so that they would be discharged from the army or some similar such act.

But some characters, like curt lemon, think that shame impels them to heroism, not stupidity. in the sweetheart of the song tra bong how does gender seem to affect reactions to war? mary anne is one of the few females featured in the book, and her experience seems to suggest that war is a great equalizer between the genders. the central topic of the things they carried is the vietnam war, but the book is also about writing and storytelling. How would you describe o 39 brien 39 s conception of the role of fiction? o 39 brien writes that fiction serves a higher purpose than merely recounting what happened. He writes that a good war story makes you wonder is it true? it makes you care about the answer to that question. After having provoked that authentic feeling, it does not actually matter if the story is true or not.

What do the characters carry aside from physical objects? the characters carry emotions like sadness and fear. O 39 brien sets up a dichotomy between weight and lightness, with war always described in terms of weight, love in terms of lightness. what role does kathleen play in this book? does she make her father feel guilty? kathleen, o 39 brien 39 s daughter, is a stand in for the reader. But because she is a character she can ask him questions, including whether or not he has ever killed anyone. O 39 brien 39 s makes a guilt tinged decision whether or not to lie, or make up stories for his daughter.

soldiers 39 tales are often an opportunity for the teller to swagger, to play the hero, to seem macho. How does o 39 brien portray this macho culture? because o 39 brien is so ambivalent toward the whole project of war, it is not surprising that this book disapproves of macho storytelling. Curt lemon is the most macho character, a man who asks a dentist to pull out a perfectly good tooth to demonstrate that he is not a sissy. Lemon dies the most horrible death imaginable, but he is still the least likeable character in the book. How is it part of the narrative? o 39 brien dedicated his book to his characters, the men he served with in vietnam. This exemplifies the uneasy position of the book with regard to fiction and non fiction. But elements like the dedication continue to point to the reality of what happened in vietnam.

How so? o 39 brien tells war stories partly so that he can relive them again and again. He argues that each time time one tells or reads a story one breathes life into the characters. For o 39 brien, fiction also resembles dreamingbecause both are involuntary: he cannot help that his experiences haunt him. what is the role of death in this book? is it a release from a nightmarish life, or something to be feared? o 39 brien, the narrator, is a profoundly non religious man. The sense of senselessness pervading this book is rooted in two things: the vietnam war seems to have no real cause or justification, and the young men killed there reach the end of their lives and effectively disappear.

O 39 brien 39 s non belief in the afterlife lends a special tinge of horror to the already horrifying events. What things are carried, and by whom? the theme of carrying is an important one throughout the text, and the title story provides the most comprehensive examination of this idea. The dense and detailed lists of objects that the men carry may seem tedious or irrelevant at times, but by mentioning that in addition to weapons soldiers brought mundane things like candy, cigarettes, and letters from their loved ones, o rsquo brien emphasizes their humanity.

And in specifying the exact weight of several of the items, including food, weapons, and gear, he gives us a very tangible idea of what it was like to struggle under such weight. The metaphor of carrying is important to o rsquo brien rsquo s work as a whole and extends through the different stories in order to give weight to the idea that the things one carries mdash whether physical or emotional mdash enable us to navigate life rsquo s inconsistencies. Many of the characters and items introduced in the first story are carried by o rsquo brien into the later stories.

Kiowa rsquo s bible and the effect it has on his life is a major topic of conversation in ldquo church. Rdquo henry dobbins rsquo s character can be explained by the fact that he carries his girlfriend rsquo s pantyhose around his neck, and in ldquo stockings, rdquo o rsquo brien recounts what happens after the girlfriend breaks up with dobbins. These recurring details indicate that personalities remained constant in vietnam and that the beliefs and hopes of the main characters sustained these personalities throughout their time in the war.

Since most of the work is personal and written from a first person perspective, what purpose does third person narration serve? why is the collection rsquo s title phrased in the third person plural? in telling stories, o rsquo brien is able to gain some distance from the harrowing experience he had in vietnam. Several of the stories in the work, specifically those centered on a particularly painful experience, are told from a third person point of view, so that o rsquo brien can sustain a distance from his memories. For example, in ldquo the man i killed, rdquo o rsquo brien describes the physical characteristics of the vietnamese soldier rsquo s corpse and illustrates how his fellow soldiers react to his killing the man, but he doesn rsquo t at any point describe how he feels about the situation. Like the other men of the alpha company, who would rather joke about how their comrades rsquo corpses look than deal with the impact of death, o rsquo brien uses third person narration to achieve a distance that would have been impossible with first person narration. The use of the third person also gives a certain amount of universality to the work mdash indeed, o rsquo brien doesn rsquo t think that his experience is any more horrific than that of his fellow soldiers. He realizes, for example, that he was not the only soldier to experience kiowa rsquo s death, and that norman bowker and jimmy cross experienced it differently and just as validly. The work is titled the things they carried, rather than the things i carried, because o rsquo brien is not speaking simply for himself, or even for his company of soldiers.

As is evident from the change of subject in the last story mdash to the death of linda, o rsquo brien rsquo s first love mdash o rsquo brien is not even speaking only about vietnam. The idea that people carry heavy emotional burdens is a universal one, and the alternation between first person narrative and third person narrative is a reflection of o rsquo brien rsquo s belief that by telling his own story, he is telling the story of many. What is the role of women in the things they carried ? although women play a small role in the things they carried, it is a significant one. Female characters such as martha, mary anne bell, and henry dobbins rsquo s unnamed girlfriend all affect the men of the alpha company mdash although in two of the cases, the women aren rsquo t even with the men they rsquo re affecting. The men idealize the women and use their presence mdash in letters, photographs, and even their imagination mdash as a kind of solace and reminder that a world does exist outside the atrocities of vietnam. Jimmy cross, for example, carries pictures of martha and memories of their only date.

He carries, also, the hope that she might one day return his love so that he has something to look forward to, after the war. Henry dobbins carries his girlfriend rsquo s pantyhose for a similar reason: to remind him of home and to distract him from the harsh realities of being the machine gunner in a platoon of soldiers. Mark fossie invites his girlfriend mary anne over to vietnam because he believes her presence might save him from the horrors before him. But the women in the things they carried don rsquo t always fulfill the fantasy role that the men carve out for them. We learn in ldquo love rdquo that even after jimmy cross returns home from the war, he cannot ever win martha rsquo s heart. Similarly, after a short while in vietnam, mary anne bell falls captive to the jungle rsquo s mystery and ends up leaving mark fossie and breaking his heart.