Things They Carried By O`Briens Essay, Research Paper

In Timothy O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, a number of insightful

themes are forwarded by the author. One theme in particular interests me the

most; the subject area is how people handle their emotions through the avoidance

or distortion of reality. Specifically, throughout the novel a number of

characters respond to the emotionally charged realities they are confronted with

in one of two major ways, distortion or escapism. This pattern, shown throughout

the novel, surveys one manner in which humans approach the rough emotions they

carry with them throughout their life. To support this thesis I will analyze a

number of character’s responses to emotional stressors and compare them against

my claims of escape and distortion reactions. I have identified two major ways

the characters I analyze respond to their realities in this novel, distortion

and escapism. When I identify something as distortion, I intend to imply that

the characters take the edge off of the reality of their situations by making

the events they encounter seem less real. Examples of such behavior would

include finding humor in otherwise horrifying situations or even romanticizing

the environment around them to make it seem something different than what it is.

The escapist manner of reacting to the intensity of emotions is to distance

oneself from the actual events or surrounding. To accomplish this all a

character needs to do is to daydream themselves away from the problem or to

create alternative realities in their own mind. It is important to establish

that O’Brien develops the premise that the emotions and situations these men had

to deal with were very intense and traumatic. Beyond the more or less obvious

contention that dealing with death and war might be painful, there is textual

support that O’Brien is trying to get this message across. On page 20, the

narrator says, "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 tangible weight." This

analysis sets up textual basis for my theme. If it is true that these soldiers

experience (d) tremendous emotions then there is room to analyze how they go

about carrying their tangible "emotional baggage." Additionally, it

should be noted that the characters I analyze in this paper are only a small

representative sample of the larger number of characters who may very well fit

my within my thesis statement. It is also noteworthy to mention that how I

classify a character in terms of their response to emotional intensity-escape or

distortion-is very much a debatable contention. Given that, I do believe,

however, that my conclusions will stand on the merit of my analysis. In the

first chapter, Timothy O’Brien wastes no time examining one coping mechanism,

escapism. Escapism is a rather basic way of handling intense emotions. Timothy

O’Brien first introduces a character named Lieutenant Jimmy Cross who exhibits

the escapist manner of dealing with his emotions. Jimmy Cross is the Lieutenant

of the group of men that this story focuses on. Jimmy Cross is first introduced

fantasizing about his love, a girl name Martha. Martha is a student back home in

New Jersey and for all intents and purposes does not return Lieutenant Cross’s

love. On pages 3 and 4, the narrator comments that, "They [the letters]

were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a

way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant."

Thus, despite the fact that Lieutenant Cross acknowledges that Martha probably

does not return his love, he still daydreams about falling in love with Martha

and the times they spent together before the war. The somewhat excessive, so it

seems to the reader, amount of time Jimmy Cross spends thinking about Martha may

indeed be a failure of reading. We ask ourselves why it is that Jimmy Cross

spends so much time thinking about Martha? This and other similar questions

about the daydreaming provide room for interpretation. This daydreaming of

Martha is a way of escaping the intensity of emotion Jimmy Cross has to bear

during the war. We find out that in the week before Ted Lavender dies Jimmy

Cross daydreams a great deal about Martha. This daydreaming helps to take him

away from the intensity of the war. On pages 9 and 10 the narrator describes how

Lieutenant Cross would walk along his missions thinking about spending time with

Martha. While on tour, Lieutenant Cross once received a pebble in a letter from

Martha. This inspired him to daydream about how she must have kept it in her

breast. He escaped to the beach where she found the pebble and vividly thought

about the waves crashing upon the beach of the Jersey shoreline. The narrator

identifies how distracting this daydreaming is when he says, "He [Jimmy

Cross] had difficulty keeping his attention on the war" (9-10). The

daydreaming about Martha is a way that Cross took himself completely away from

the war. He could be thousands of miles away on a quiet beach in Jersey as the

war raged on around him. Another character who demonstrates escapism is our

child of the Song Tra Bong, Mary Anne. This act of escape is slightly more

radical than Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s response, however. The chapter, "The

Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," allows the reader a chance to evaluate a

more extreme reaction to the emotions of war. The story of Mary Anne begins with

her boyfriend who is part of a small medical regiment located along a river,

called the Song Tra Bong. Rat Kiley is the narrator of the story; he was also a

part of this regiment, along with Mary Anne’s boyfriend, Mark Fossie. Rat Kiley

explains how Mark Fossie arranged to have his girlfriend brought over to

Vietnam, so they could be together. Marry Anne comes over to Vietnam and is

delivered to the medical outpost by way of supplies chopper. Mary Anne is

depicted by O’Brien to be very innocent. She is described as a soft, curious,

and friendly person adorned in her pink sweater. The feminine elements are

stressed in the description of her in order to juxtapose her against the

harsher, more masculine, surroundings. It is this dissimilarity, between Mary

Anne’s serenity and the war’s roughness, which allows us to see how fully the

war could force a person to confront an uncomfortable reality. As the story

progresses Mary Anne begins to change from her bubbly and alive pink sweater

persona into a more withdrawn individual. On page 109, Rat Kiley describes,

"The way she quickly fell into the habits of the bush. No cosmetics, no

fingernail filing. She stopped wearing jewelry, cut her hair short and wrapped

it in a dark green bandana." A noticeable point of departure is when Mary

Anne begins to spend more and more time with the Green Berets and even goes on

an ambush with them. After going on the ambush Mary Anne is remarkably

withdrawn. Despite that she temporarily seems to get "straightened

out" by her boyfriend and ends up wearing a nice blue dress and has groomed

hair the next day, she is still distinctly different than before. As Rat Kiley

notes on page 113, "Over dinner she kept her eyes down, poking at her food,

subdued to the point of silence." Questions run through the reader’s mind

at this point. What did she see out there? What does she feel? Why is she acting

like this? These questions signify a failure of reading. They force us to wonder

what to make of Mary Anne’s character change and her reactions. The remainder of

the story of Mary Anne brings us to her eventual departure into the jungle. Not

on a mission with the Green Berets, but alone. She simply disappears. If we

conjecture that while on their missions the Green Berets ambushed and killed

people, then it is reasonable to assume that Mary Anne experienced and witnessed

killing. Perhaps, the horror of such acts forced her to run. The intense

emotions that the war produces within simply got to her. Her reaction was to

escape. She escaped from a world in which she had to deal with the emotions into

a world in which she let herself be consumed by them. These two examples support

the idea that when confronted with great emotional shock people desperately try

to avoid the reality of their situation. Alas, escape is not the only way

Timothy O’Brien develops this theme. Another way to respond to the reality of a

situation wrought with emotional dismay is to distort that reality. What does it

mean to distort reality? It means to make reality seem not what it is. To alter

how one views the situation. To take the edge off realities harshness. To dull

the otherwise piercing emotional intensity. There are a couple of significant

examples of reality distortion that I will identify. The first example is the

use of humor in otherwise horrifying situations in order to make the situation

less real. After Ted Lavender dies the men in his company make fun of the

circumstances of his death. Ted Lavender was urinating while he was shot and he

also happened to be doped up at the time. It is important to note that Ted

Lavender used tranquilizers in abnormally large amounts. They made jokes about

his death. Mitchell Sanders provides a specific example of this behavior.

Shortly after Lavender’s death Sanders made a joke that "The moral’s pretty

obvious. Sanders said, and winked. Stay away from drugs. No joke, they’ll ruin

your day every time" (20). The narrator says the men even joked about how

"poor guy didn’t even feel a thing, how incredibly tranquil he was"

(20). The joking about death is a failure of reading. We might ask ourselves why

would people joke about such issues? Do they have no emotions? It is when we ask

these questions that we see yet another instance of reality avoidance in the

novel. These men are not emotionless; on the contrary, they are so filled with

internal emotional conflict that their joking is a way of responding to the

reality they are faced with, the death of a friend and fellow soldier. The

narrator says on page 19, "They were afraid of dying but they were even

more afraid to show it. They found jokes to tell. They used a hard vocabulary to

contain the terrible softness." This quotation captures very accurately the

idea that some people respond to intense emotion through humor. This is yet

another method of reality avoidance in emotionally intense situations. The final

example I will analyze is in regards to the story of Norman Bowker. This story

is a good example of the distortion that often occurs when people are working

through emotionally taxing situations. Norman Bowker is a member of the company

that Timothy O’Brien was in during Vietnam. After the war, Norman Bowker

returned home to his quiet hometown of Des Moines. The story revolves around

Norman Bowker driving around the town. Specifically, Norman drives around a lake

near Sunset Park. In this story Bowker thinks to himself about his life and how

things might have been different if he had not gone to the war. After a while,

it becomes apparent the Bowker keeps imaging conversations he would have with

people given different circumstances. One such conversation is what he might

have said to people if he had received the silver medal of courage. In

particular, he imagines what the conversation with his father would have been

like. Then again, he creates a number of conversations with his former

heartthrob, Sally. At one point in the story Bowker attempts to speak his story

or his mind to the person over the intercom at A&W. Even then he cannot

bring himself to talk about. The narrator on page 172 tells us that "He

could not talk about it and never would." This inability to talk about the

war and, moreover, the made up conversations, are grounds for interpretation.

The ending of this story suggests that Norman Bowker had some deeply held

emotional problems he needed to deal with. This claim has warrant because at the

end of this story Norman Bowker kills himself. Keep in mind the thesis; people

distort their reality when confronted with extreme emotional conflict. Given

that, we can now make some sense of the conversations Norman Bowker fantasizes

about. Quite simply, Norman Bowker is experiencing readjustment problems and

cannot cope with his sadness. So, he distorts his silent reality, in which he

cannot bring himself to speak to anyone, by creating made up conversations with

people. These conversations serve as a coping device for his emotions, which are

otherwise kept bottled up. The repetition of different characters avoiding the

very real and emotionally difficult situations they encounter suggests something

larger about people. The war, as the backdrop for The Things They Carried,

provides Timothy O’Brien with the cause for emotional conflict in his

characters. From this starting point the novel becomes quite a valuable document

for examining how people deal with their emotional baggage. The repetitive

avoidance through either escapism or distortion is an insight this novel gives

us about people at large. As said on page 21, "By and large they carried

these things inside, maintaining the masks of composure." Given this

observation, it might be said that some people wear masks that alter their

perception of reality and others wear masks that give them flight.