Emotions in The Things They Carried Essay Example

Tim O’Brien uses his Narrative to communicate the emotions felt through war time. His tones of mixed emotions change with each passage as does his writing style. The combination of rhetorical devices such as: syntax, polysyndeton, and other figurative languages contribute to the narrative’s emotional enticement. 

To start off, Tim O’Brien uses contrasting and comparing to retell the story of Norman Bowker and Henry Dobbins playing checkers. He compares the war to a game of checkers. The text states, “You knew where you stood...the enemy was visible...There was a winner and a loser. There were rules” (O’Brien 31). In checkers,  the other opponents' moves are visible and it is easy to find a counter strategy. In war, the enemy is unknown and it is not nice and clean. Lives are lost and both sides are losers in the end. Furthermore, Tim O’Brien also uses a warming and bittersweet story right after to contrast the last story while also building on top of it. The imagery in this passage is very present as many can find a way to relate to the text. “All around us the place was littered with Bouncing Betties, and Toe Poppers, and booby-trapped artillery rounds, but in the five days on the Batangan Peninsula nobody got hurt. We all learned to love the old man” (O’Brien 32). The syntax also takes place here as the sentence goes from a long and involved sentence to a short sentence. Thus showing how they were together for a long time and in a short amount of time they grew to love the old Poppa-San. Tim O’Brien may be repurposing his story by showing how Poppa-San represented the last of their youth, and once he left they were no longer the bright eyed soldiers from the beginning of the war.

To add on, not all parts of the war were action packed and thrilling. O’Brien makes note of that when using polysyndeton in his paragraph that describes the boring part of the war. “You’d be sitting at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you’d feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet, except it wasn’t water, it was a sort of acid, and with each little droplet you’d feel the stuff eating away at important organs” (O’Brien 33). The feeling of boredom mixed in with a tone of despair and dread imminates off the page as a contrasting tone from the last one. The emotions being weighed down here are heavy as if to say the waiting may have been the worst part of the war; the anxiety of not knowing when the next fight would happen. Tim O’Brien also uses intense imagery in the next passage when he talks about how the war was constant and how he cannot just forget about it. He describes his writing style like traffic. Memory emcompasses emotions that feed imagination; following the path, and writing down the adventure seen before you (O’Brien 33). He follows a story and like a road there are many stops along the way and it is very easy to get side-tracked. It explains the jumping around and the abruptness in each passage as he tells contrasting and differing stories as one story leads to another until he has written all he wants to write. O’Brien utilizes sight and touch imagery to help the reader feel more present in the novel. He uses descriptive words while using juxtaposition to further the narrative, “You’re pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a paddy, getting your ass delivered to kingdom come...The immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs--the whole world gets rearranged--and even though you’re pinned down by a war you never felt more at peace” (O’Brien 34). The two opposing ideas help wrap the passage up by showing how the war was horrible at times but at other times he could not imagine being anywhere else. The war was a part of him now whether he liked it or not. 

To summarize, the war was not one part but many different and intricate parts that all are important to the story. Tim O’Brien cannot ever forget the war; yet, instead of suffering with his memories he follows the thread of stories and writes them down for others to read. His descriptive imagery helps entice the reader while reminding and desperately attempting to convey the emotions that himself and the other soldiers felt throughout the war. The memories that cannot be forgotten and the emotions that live on forever.