Signposts In The Things They Carried

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Throughout books there are several recurring ideas, signposts, ranging from tough questions that characters must ask themselves to images or ideas that pop up time and time again, to how the story might be interrupted constantly by memories that characters have, and there are many more. The signposts reveal many aspects of the theme of the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien many instances in the book are repeated over and over, or rather again and again. The book focuses on many different war stories, and the author’s repetition of information and scenarios emphasizes the impact the they have on him and other characters, specifically the obsessive behavior portrayed by them. At the start of the book, Tim O’Brien introduces readers …show more content…
A burden many characters carry with them is knowing they had to kill someone, but for Norman it’s the knowledge that he couldn’t do anything to save one of his allies. He is plagued by the constant nagging of remembering how he could have saved Kiowa, but didn’t. Again and again Norman states how he could have gotten a silver star, but didn’t because of the smell. Running scenarios in his mind of conversations he wasn’t having of how he could have gotten a silver star, he became obsessed with the things he didn’t do, the things he could have had. Again and again he tells his father or Sally that “[he] had the chance and [he] blew it. The stink, that’s what got to [him]. [He] couldn’t take the goddamn awful smell”(142), he runs through these scenarios many times, but never tells anyone even when he has the chance to. The stench is what Norman blames for his failure to act, regardless of how he was perfectly capable of saving Kiowa, it’s the stench of the swamp that held him from acting. The repetition of Norman’s struggle to save Kiowa emphasizes his obsession with the past and his denial of his own
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