The Things They Carried Theme Essay

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Every novel contains at least one theme, and those themes are the story. The themes also affect the characters in a book as well, like The Things They Carry affect Tim O’Brien. Tim O’Brien is like most soldiers during that time, and gets affected in many ways. Like any war it has damaging effects on him, even before he goes to war it affects him. No one comes back from a war the same as they were before. In The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien illustrates many of the crucial themes of the novel; the crucial themes being the loss of innocence, the power of shame and embarrassment, and the power of storytelling that he represents. Everyone starts out with an innocence in life and over time that innocence will decay. Tim O’Brien does not shake the deceased hands when he first arrives, and is troubled by the practice (214). Though that does not change, Tim O’Brien does change in some ways, confirming it by saying, “I’d come to this war a quiet, thoughtful sort of person…I'd turned mean inside” (190). He came to the war with his morals intact, but the more time he spends in Vietnam, the more warped he becomes where he hurts others that are on …show more content…
The themes that are in the novel are in everyday life for everyone, because everyone has a story, or had a life-changing event, or an embarrassing moment in their life. Though the situations are not all similar or as serious as Tim O’Brien’s are, they are still all moments that people go through in life. With themes as powerful as these are there will always be one character in a book that embodies them like Tim does. The Things They Carried shows how much a soldier goes through from beginning to end, and that even before the actual war, they have had battles in their life. Everyone in life struggles and has to overcome them like Tim O’Brien does, but not in the same way as him like he does through stories and looking back on his

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