Essay about Alex Rodriguez

Submitted By alexgoldman
Words: 702
Pages: 3

The Affect of the War No matter what type of confrontation one may be engaged in, the results are usually experiences that will affect the person involved. In the situations that the characters of Tim O’Brien’s post-modern war novel, The Things They Carried, many characters are exposed to staining experiences during their time serving in the Vietnam War that alter their lives. With any war there are bound to be gruesome sights that may cause one to get queasy, but nothing compares to the hardships the characters endure while in Vietnam and the affect they have on them. Although many characters bring home scarring experiences from the war, the main three characters affected by the war are Jimmy Cross, Tim O’Brien, and Norman Bowker who share guilt and long for closure. When promoted to lieutenant one gains not only a title, but also the responsibility of the lives of the men in his platoon. Since it is near inevitable for deaths to occur, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross concedes major affects of the war. Cross’ guilt is evident when Ted Lavender dies and he digs a hole and weeps in it. Also when Kiowa dies Cross feels obligated to send Kiowa’s father a letter taking responsibility for the death, and then O’Brien mentions that Cross begins to second guess his prior decisions. The character Tim O’Brien also suffers a great deal of guilt after killing what might be an innocent Vietnamese citizen. In the short story “The Man I Killed” it is clear that O’Brien has a hard time surmounting killing a boy by the fact that he is unable to talk to Kiowa about it but instead only reminisces about the vivid details of the corpse, “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole…” (O’Brien 118). A reader can deduce the ongoing remorse since he lies to his daughter when she questions him about killing people during his time in the war. The two men continue to experience guilt when meeting up many years after the war and reminiscing over pictures of men in the platoon O’Brien writes, “Jimmy rubbed his eyes and said he’d never forgiven himself for Lavender’s death…I nodded and told him I felt the same about certain things” (26). These two men experience a great deal of unfortunate events that have lifelong affects but Norman Bowker is most harshly impacted. During one of the war stories it is described that Bowker has the opportunity to save Kiowa but does not in order to save his own life.