Analyzing the protagonist. Read "The Things They Carried",Tim O'Brien

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25 February 2019
The Things They Carried
In the short stories The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien is both the narrator and the protagonist. He is a Vietnam veteran who became a writer after returning home from the war. He tells stories of his platoon which involve tragedy and horrors of the war. The stories Tim shares show the way he struggled to come to terms with his guilt and confusion of the horrors he witnessed during the war, which include his involvement in killing a man and the death of several of his fellow soldiers. In his stories, he attempts to justify his involvement in the war by concluding that his duty to his family and country came before his political beliefs. Although Tim uses storytelling as a way to come to terms with the horrors he experienced during the war, he still thinks that it is impossible to have an explanation for certain realities.
The stories recount his personal experiences in the war, and he also comments on them. The war changes him; he enters it a young man afraid of the shame dodging the war would bring but leaves it as a middle-aged man who tells stories of it to cope with painful memories. Reading these stories is similar to spending much time with a soldier allowing his memories to slowly trickle as The Things They Carried can be viewed as a thread of memories. Lingering losses surround Tim's life. It started with the death of Linda when Timmy was just a little boy; it is followed by horrors in the Vietnam War and the death of his fellow soldiers. As much as the title The Things They Carried generally referred to the soldiers, in this case, it applies to the lingering memories in Tim’s life. It is the reason he invents stories to add to the cold facts; he becomes both a narrator and an active character in the stories as a way of dealing with these losses.
Tim shapes the events he relates to through his point of view. In many of the stories, he points to himself as an example of the assumptions and generalizations he makes about the war. He guides the reader through the unspeakable horrors of the war and shows how some extreme acts and situation can turn an otherwise rational man into a soldier who commits the very same cruel acts and his desire for cruel and irrational things. Once in a while, Tim fades away from the scene and acts as an observer which gives a human quality to the stories and gives the reader an opportunity to understand the situations from several different perspectives.
Tim is very observant and can capture the characters and events in detail which makes them spring into vivid life. Jimmy Cross sees this and says to him, “You writer types, you have got long memories” (O'Brien, 27). Tim’s attention to detail makes him take note of the things that are both precious and essential to people and which reveals their individuality and feelings despite th...