The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien represents the epitome of dehumanization that war inflicts on people. Each character is involved in a short story that makes up the entire novel; their different traits make up not only their personality but their entire persona and how their social role contributed to the overall message. The characters participation in the war leads to many tragic fates such as absurdity, trauma, and suicide.
In the novel, Mary Anne, Tim O’Brien, and Norman Bowker’s lives were deeply changed by their time in Vietnam because they were forced to adapt to the demands of war and earned to cope with their emotional baggage and mental In a chapter called, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” Mary Anne Bell was an innocent young girl who flew in to visit her boyfriend, Mark Fossie, in Vietnam where she quickly becomes curious about the ways of war and begins to adapt to this new, yet dangerous, lifestyle.
She begins as an outsider whose innocence quickly diminishes as she becomes consumed by the war. However, the men find comfort in knowing that she is a girl who has come to know the brutal and unapologetic tragedies of war that most young girls would never experience nd she “made you think about those girls back home, how clean and innocent they all are, how they’ll never understand any of this, not in a billion years” (93).
Her ability to quickly adapt burdens. o the war environment leads her to further quench her curiosity by becoming more and more rebellious. Mary Anne’s innocence is lost when she becomes absurd and completely absorbed by the war and is found surrounded by dead animals and bones after being missing for weeks. The men had said that “[Mary Anne] had crossed to the other side. She was part of the land. She was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace made of human tongues. She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill” (110).
Mary Anne was a sheltered young girl who was given the chance to try something new and her consumption by the war was far more overpowering than the other characters in the novel leading her insanity. War has a way of bringing out people’s cruel and dark sides. For example, another character who was transformed by the horrors of war was Tim O’Brien, and in the chapter, “The Man I Killed” Tim was affected by the war in a traumatic and gruesome way. He is left with guilt, grief, and silence after murdering a young Vietnamese man.
The man’s corpse was described in detail with having his aw in his throat, and a star shaped hole in one eye. Tim is unable to look away from the corpse and begins imagining what the man’s life was like before murdering him. He imagined him to be involved with math and love and he came to the conclusion that this “frail-looking, delicately boned young man would not have wanted to be a soldier and in his heart would have feared performing badly in battle” (121). Tim feels guilty that he killed this innocent man because he sees himself in the corpse.
Tim feels grief and identifies with the man because he imagines that they both felt obligated to fight in the war to fulfill heir nations duty even when they both originally did not want to fight at all. As Tim stares at the corpse, he is unable to speak to the other platoon members and is silenced by his internal conflict of just murdering someone. Kiowa, one of the platoon members, tries to comfort Tim by saying, “I’ll tell you the straight truth… The guy was dead the second he stepped on the trail… we all had him zeroed” (123).
Tim is left to face his dehumanizing companions and left to ponder whether or not he should be considered a war hero which ultimately leads him to be traumatized by this event for the rest of his life. The detestation f war left many men traumatized and silenced by their internal conflict similar to Tim O’Brien. For example, in the chapter called, “Speaking of Courage”, Norman Bowker lives in a quaint town yet he is unable to escape from the effects of the war. During the war, the platoon men were in a swampy field that sucked Kiowa down where he lost his life.
Norman struggles to accept the death of Kiowa and continuously blames himself because he had the opportunity to pull Kiowa out and receive the Silver Star Award. However, the smell of the field was too much to bear and he was unsuccessful in his attempt to save Kiowa. Norman’s internal conflict between courageousness and cowardliness leaves uncertainty in his life and he feels that there is no one who he could talk to that could possibly understand. As Norman drives aimlessly in circles around the lake in town, he comes to realize that, “He could not talk about it and never would…
If it had been possible, which it wasn’t, he would have explained how his friend Kiowa slipped away that night beneath the dark swampy field. He was folded in with the war; he was part of the waste” (147). Although Norman is out of the war, he is still at war within himself for letting Kiowa go and the field was metaphor for the wasted and meaningless battle they were forced to slip into. Norman thought about how “he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be.
The distinction was important” (147). Norman feels as though he betrayed a friend and eventually he takes his own life in order to escape from it all. With the rise and fall of bravery and courageousness also comes a common theme among all of the characters — the rise and fall of dreams. Mary Anne did not originally dream of consuming the war, yet after converting to the dangerous and dgy lifestyle, she says, “Sometimes I want to eat this place. The whole country — the dirt, the death — I just want to swallow it and have it there inside me” (106).
The war unapologetically and completely corrupted a young innocent girl and transformed her into a nasty war animal. Tim O’Brien’s dream was to avoid the war at all costs, yet he participated in the war and took a life. War brought out the evil instinct Tim inherited and although he wanted nothing to do with the war, “Beyond anything else, he was afraid of disgracing himself” (121). Norman Bowker’s dream was to find an escape from the war and be at peace with the oss of his friend. However, his guilt would not let him live with himself.
He tried to cope with the grief by occupying his time with pickup basketball and odd jobs, but the war made Norman feel so alienated and alone that he physically could not talk about it and thought the best decision was to take his life. The conclusions drawn about men and war are that it brings out the negative qualities in people and although one can physically escape the war, the war never emotionally leaves someone untouched. Mary Anne, Tim O’Brien, and Norman Bowker each brought a different element of the dehumanization of war ncluding absurdity, trauma, and suicide.
Their lives were deeply transformed by the demands of war and the emotional stress that they had to carry with them. As George Orwell states, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. ” The men went to war not for the sake of fighting for their country, but because going to war kept the peace. Freedom is slavery because although men like Norman Bowker physically gained freedom from the war, he was unable to escape the war within himself. Ignorance is strength in the sense that It is easier to be oblivious than live with the burden of knowing evil.
