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The Burdens They Carried

            In Tim O"Brien's "The Things They Carried" the soldiers carry guns, ammunition, and body armor to keep them as safe and as protected as possible. Each one carries things important to them as well as the standard issued items. They carry pictures and letters helping them remember girls they have left behind and who they want to see. Depending on the type of person such things as tranquilizers or marijuana are carried. But each soldier carries these items for fear of getting shot and killed. They have to take their mind off of the war and the fighting if just for a couple of minutes. If a soldier carries something that they think protects them then he is a lot more comfortable then he would be without it. The soldiers that O"Brien writes about carry both physical and emotional burdens, which show readers who they are.
             Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries all of the standard issue gear and also letters from Martha (435). Martha is a girl who he daydreams about. He dreams of her and thinks about nights in which he had actually touched her knee (437). The Lieutenant also carries a responsibility to each of his men. He is responsible for the lives of each and one of the men in his platoon. This frightens him just as much as the fear of dying in the war. Nobody wants to die especially in the war and Lieutenant Cross is no different. Cross is shown as a caring person through the things that he carries. The pictures and the memories of Martha also show that he is holding on to something that may not be there. But the fact that he has the pictures comforts him and keeps him from freaking out and abandoning his troops in battle. Lieutenant Cross also is shown as a very superstitious person by carrying a good-luck pebble (441). This makes him comfortable and does not allow him to fear the war. After Lavender dies Cross finally realizes that he is endangering his troops lives as well as his by going off in daydreams about Martha.


Essays Related to The Burdens They Carried

1. the things they carried

... of a foot soldier. This is a story not so much about the things the men of Alpha Company carried, but rather the burdens that they could not put down. O"Brien subtly explains how the men carry their thoughts, memories and "unweighed fear". Throughout the story, O"Brien gives long, tedious, monotonous and utterly boring lists of the things the men carried. "The things they carried were largely determined by necessity", but each man's necessities were different ... "each manfully carrying his own weight but also sharing the burden of war."(p.24) Their memories are burdens they carry that ...

  • Word Count: 1054
  • Approx Pages: 4
  • Grade Level: High School

2. Critical Analysis for The Things They Carried

... hints into the true thoughts running oppressing his mind. The visions of Martha consume his brain, making him somewhat oblivious to the war acts going on around him. The other kind of physical burdens that the soldiers bear are those of the nature surrounding them. The difficulty of what they carried was best described as" The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus ... and decay, all of it, they carried gravity" (O"Brien 713). Through Oppliger 3 historical ... feelings. If he carries a great deal of emotional burdens, he would probably feel mo...

  • Word Count: 1097
  • Approx Pages: 4
  • Grade Level: High School

3. The things they carry

... of a foot soldier. This is a story not so much about the things the men of Alpha Company carried, but rather the burdens that they could not put down. O"Brien subtly explains how the men carry their thoughts, memories and "unweighed fear". Throughout the story, O"Brien gives long, tedious, monotonous and utterly boring lists of the things the men carried. "The things they carried were largely determined by necessity", but each man's necessities were different ... "each manfully carrying his own weight but also sharing the burden of war."(p.24) Their memories are burdens they carry that ...

  • Word Count: 1047
  • Approx Pages: 4
  • Grade Level: High School

4. The Things They Carried

... sort of way. He would just make statements about what the soldiers carried and then tell the reader how much each weighed. As he began to talk about the intangible things they carried, such as memories, fears, desires, motives, and things of that nature, he became very passionate and emotionally attached to their thoughts and their burdens. As an authorial reader, Tim O"Brien probably wants us to ... recognize these intangible burdens as being just as encumbering as the load they carried on their backs. He wants us to realize that the war causes people to have a heightened sense of fear...

  • Word Count: 1072
  • Approx Pages: 4

5. The Things They Carried

... would carry were both tangible and intangible items. Each soldier carried their own burdens. They all carried the basic essentials for survival of war and the things that would make living possible by carrying the bare minimum of what they absolutely had to have. These were the items that were tangible. But the soldiers also carried other heavy burdens upon their shoulders. They carried heavy loads of memories, fears, desires, and other heavy emotions ... : "They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere they carried gravity." The reader is given much attention to the weight and pressure of ...

  • Word Count: 922
  • Approx Pages: 4
  • Grade Level: High School

6. The Burden of Emotion in The Things They Carried

... ." Through this description of war, Seneca distinguishes the physical aspect of war and the emotional or psychological aspect. He also expounds that the emotional side dominates the physical. Through the sands of time, this idea has remained intact. Tim O'Brien, author of "The Things They Carried," voices the idea that the mental burdens outweigh the physical agony that those in war must carry: "They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief ... , terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangib...

  • Word Count: 1146
  • Approx Pages: 5
  • Grade Level: High School

7. The Things They Carried

... bear. In the conversation between Sanders and Dobbins they talk about the moral of finding the VC solider. The moral turns out to be that there is no moral, showing that they knew that they shouldn't have been there in the first place. They were fighting an enemy much bigger than the Viet Cong they were fighting their own minds, their own fears, their own burdens. "They carried the land itself--- Vietnam, the place, the soil--- a powdery ... orange-red dust- This quote shows exactly how heavy a burden the war was. It wasn't a battle it was a march ... ...

  • Word Count: 1163
  • Approx Pages: 5
  • Grade Level: High School

8. The Spiderman Complex

... of each person's individual circumstances of life. The ways in which an individual's personality works with these unique circumstances will determine how burdens are handled and carried out by each individual. In this paper, I will use certain philosophical ideas of Nietzsche and Sartre to discuss the burdens of moral responsibility and suffering as they present themselves as the prevalent dichotomy of Peter Parker's young life. Parker, upon ... whom the role of Spiderman is thrust, must deal with this dichotomy ... ...

  • Word Count: 1557
  • Approx Pages: 6

9. Physical and Emotional Weight - The Things They Carried

... in his book "The Things They Carried". The objects they carried often weighed of necessity to protect them from the bullets escaping the barrel of a Vietcong soldier and of the safety, although the author said it as "the illusion of safety" keeping their emotions from objects that kept themselves intact harboring their emotions at bay away from the others in the platoon (O'Brien 235). The physical burdens they carried "presented itself whatever ... seemed appropriate as a means of killing or staying alive," raincoats prevented wet clothes, but the rain drenched the equipment with unnece...

  • Word Count: 1571
  • Approx Pages: 6
  • Has Bibliography
  • Grade Level: High School

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