Trauma In The Things They Carried Essay Sample

The novel, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, defines trauma as a debilitating event or action. Trauma is exceedingly difficult to live with, it acts like a disease on the mind and body. Even with the hardships that come with trauma, these experiences can shape someone into a better person, and can be something that a person can live with.

Trauma is an event that affects you mentally or physically in a negative way to the point of being carried with you for extended periods of time that change you. A girl at the age of ten was sexually abused until twelve by a mother’s boyfriend who also abused her younger sister who was seven. This abuse that went on for almost three years was traumatic and something no one should have live through especially while trying to be strong for there younger sister. She got helped and removed her and her sister from it*, she was so strong for herself and her sister and was changed by this and managed to move on with her life, but this would change anyone forever.

In “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien he writes about how the soldiers in Vietnam lived through trauma and how it affected them after the war. “But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.” (O’Brien 33). This Quotation talks about Trauma as something you do not forget and lives with you as a ghost that forever will haunt you. Trauma can live with you forcing you to remember and bringing you straight back to the events. Other events can be seared into your memories as something you cannot forget because of what you have seen like in this next example.

In this example from “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien he talks of how trauma is not always remembering everything because you do not need to. Tim O’Brien says, “What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end” (O’Brien 34). Trauma is not always about what took place but more of the feeling, you remember how you feel not always what made you feel that way. Trauma is the memory of feelings of an event where the details are not the important part of details. The definitions of trauma are similar to each other but can be different to interpretation.

Trauma can be interpreted as a debilitating event that makes it hard to live with like in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien or as an event that changes you but can be worked through. In the example trauma is similar to the soldiers because of how it has an effect on your day-to-day life but differs because she could live through it where the soldiers were portrayed as unable to move through it.