Whitney+ S

= = ﻿ The Things They Carried

By: Tim O'Brien [] [] __Critics:__ New York Times wrote "Belongs high on the list of best fiction about any war..crystallizes the Vietnam experience for everyone and exposes the nature of all war stories."

Hartford Courant wrote " O'Brien has unmistakably forged one of the most persuasive works of any kind to arise out of any war."

St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote " One hell of a book...You'll rareky read anything as real as this."

The Associated Press wrote " A powerful yet lyrical work of fiction."

__ Quotes: __ "I couldn't endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule and right then I submitted that I would go to war. I would kill and maybe die because I was embarrassed not to."

"When we first got here --all of us-- we were real young and innocent, full of romantic bullshit, but we learned pretty damn quick."

"We keep the dead alive with stories."

Video One: This video has a lot to do with my book. It has a song that has to do with war and then it has a lot of pictures from the Vietnam war. A lot of the stories that O'Brien tells in the book can also be told through these pictures of the war. It lets you know how the soldiers are suffering and gives you the general idea of what war really is. In the book, O'Brien tells a lot of stories that he admitted he had made up, he says that when you tell a story that you really start to dream about it. If you picture it in your head and you start to believe it, it can tell a story. This video is trying to give you the general idea of what war is, and how they soldiers got through each day in Vietnam.

Video Two: This video clearly ties into my book a great deal. Video two is Tim O'Brien speaking about a conference because he has just won a prize for writing The Things They Carried. He talks about why he wrote the book and what the book means to him. He started to tell some of the stories that are in the book, and related himself to a lot of the characters that he also included in the book. This video is him talking about the book.

Quote One: This quote has a lot to do with the theme of the first section of the book. A lot of the soldiers in this book are scared to do what they want because they are scared of what other people will think of them. In this quote O'Brien has just gotten drafted into the war and doesn't want to go. He doesn't want to look like a coward to all the people in his town though. Since he didn't know if he wanted to go to war or not, he decides he wants to take a trip to Canada to think it out. There he meets a man named Elroy who listened to everything he has to say. That's when he decided he was going to enter the war because he didn't want to deal with the embarrassment of not going.

Quote Two: This quote from the second section of the book is very meaningful. This is when one of the soldiers girlfriend comes over to stay with the soldiers and see her boyfriend. Rat Kiley is explaining that when all of the men came over to war that they were all in their fantasy worlds from back home. They all were still in love with their girlfriends, and that is all they thought about. But, all of them soon realized that war is a very different life. When you come over to war you think about good things, but by the time you leave you are thinking about all the harsh things of war. He is talking about the soldiers girlfriend, she came over wearing a pink sweater and all girly. When it was time for her to leave, she was customed to the lifestyle of the soldiers.

Quote Three: The last quote has to do with the whole book. Throughout the whole book O'Brien is telling war stories from their time over in Vietnam. A lot of his good friends and soldiers had died while they were serving in the war. He is continuing to tell stories about those soldiers and loved ones because he says that when you tell a story of a dead person it is like they are alive all over again. It makes you relive those moments when they were here.