Women In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

Words: 597
Pages: 3

In “The Things They Carried” there are not a lot of women that appear in the book, but there is quite a few that played an important role. They may not seem to mean as much to us, but the key roles they play for the men in war give us a new kind of understanding. They are a sense of home for the soldiers.
Mary Anne Bell was a girl from Cleveland who came to Vietnam to be with her boyfriend, Mark Fossie. She was an attractive girl with a bubbly personality and a happy smile. Everyone likes her as she is really friendly and outgoing. “At the beginning of her second week she began pestering Mark Fossie to take her down to the village at the foot of the hill”. As time goes by she became curious about things. She fell in love with Vietnam, the war. She goes into the mountain by herself and did not return for a couple of days. “Her body seemed foreign somehow - too stiff in places, too firm where the softness used to be”. The way she expresses herself has changed, her personality changed, her bubbliness and nervous giggling was gone and looks like she’s
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Jimmy carries letters from her with a sign “Love, Martha”, but he “understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretends it meant”. He also carries the memory of their date at the movie. One day, Jimmy and his men are ordered to destroy the tunnel. Cross’ begin to imagine of him and Martha and think about whether Martha is virgin or not. When he snaps out of his fantasy world, the next thing he noticed was Ted Lavender being shot. “He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach or the rest of the war”. Cross think that because he was so obsessed with his fantasy of Martha, one of his men is killed. Martha is a symbol of love/fantasies. Even if they are only friend, her existence keeps Jimmy Cross alive throughout the