The Things They Carried Analysis

In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the story of a group of young
soldiers who are not ready to face war is told. The book does not follow a
chronological order, rather, each chapter is like a different story in itself. This
scattered order displays the way memories are organized within the head of a
soldier. Various stories displaying an anti war theme are told, showing the
effects the war has on people. The people enter the setting of war as normal
people, but leave changed, sometimes corrupted. They show how extensively
war can change people, sticking with them till their final breaths.
A setting of war contributes to death being desensitized for Kiowa.
When Ted Lavender dies, Kiowa seemingly treats it as a joke, feeling no
sadness at all. After Ted Lavender’s unexpected death, he says in jest, “A
pisser, you know? Still zipping himself up. Zapped while zipping.” This is due
to the fact that he is encompassed by the setting of war, and with so much
death, he can no longer view it as a normal human would. Kiowa “wished he
could find some great sadness, or even anger, but the emotion wasn’t there
and he couldn’t make it happen.” Even if he wishes to, the war has had such a
great effect on him that he cannot feel sad after a companion dies. Moreover,
when O’Brien kills a man, he feels remorse, so Kiowa consoles him, saying,
“You feel terrible, I know that." Then later admitting that; "Okay, maybe I
don't know." Kiowa shows that he cannot know the way that O’Brien feels, and
cannot feel sadness, anger, or remorse due to death, and will remain
indifferent. He displays that his mentality is encompassed by the war, telling
O’Brien “that it was a good kill, that I was a soldier and this was a war.”
Furthermore, it is told that Kiowa, “was a splendid human being, the very best,
intelligent and gentle and quiet-spoken. Very brave, too. And decent.”
However, when he goes into the war, he loses the human nature of mourning
death, and even though he was a good person, he cannot prevent the war
desensitizing him in regards to death.
Imagery of war displays how people can be corrupted and ultimately
dehumanized by war. This is displayed when a soldier called Mark Fossie calls
over his girlfriend, Mary Anne, to Vietnam. She transfers from a normal
setting, “fresh out of Cleveland Heights Senior High”, to a setting of war. Mary
Anne is first portrayed as a stereotypical American, with “a suitcase and one of
those plastic cosmetic bags,” and “long white legs and blue eyes and a
complexion like strawberry ice cream.” However, after a few weeks, and
working with the medics, Mary Anne begins to truly experience war. The
imagery shifts, and Mary Anne has now begun to adopt the war routine by
abandoning her previous habits. She adopts the “habits of the bush. No
cosmetics, no fingernail filing. She stopped wearing jewelry, cut her hair short
and wrapped it in a dark green bandanna. Hygiene became a matter of small
consequence.” Later on, the shift into war imagery becomes more profound,
and Mary Anne goes to an ambush with the Green Berets. She comes back
wearing a “bush hat and filthy green fatigues; she carried the standard M-16
automatic assault rifle; her face was black with charcoal.” This is a shift of
imagery which displays the transition into a war-oriented attitude. The shift is
quite profound already, yet is amplified later on. Mark Fossie wants to send
Mary Anne back home, yet Mary Anne doesn’t want to leave the war setting,
and falls into a depressive state, “She would not speak. Shoulders hunched,
her blue eyes opaque, she seemed to disappear inside herself. A couple of
times Fossie approached her and tried to talk it out, but Mary Anne just stared
out at the dark green mountains to the west. The wilderness seemed to draw
her in.” A normal human, like the old Mary Anne, a “seventeen-year-old doll in
her goddamn culottes, perky and fresh- faced, like a cheerleader visiting the
opposing team's locker room” would want to leave the war, leave the killing
and go to a peaceful setting. Yet the war corrupts Mary Anne, and takes out
the humanity in her. Mary Anne goes for an ambush with the Green Berets and
does not return for three weeks. When she returns, she has lost all her human
qualities, and has become a killer, wearing “a necklace of human tongues.
Elongated and narrow, like pieces of blackened leather, the tongues were
threaded along a length of copper wire, one overlapping the next, the tips
curled upward as if caught in a final shrill syllable.” She has been wholly
corrupted by the war, which turned someone with a “bubbly personality” and
“a happy smile”, to someone who had “ no emotion in her stare, no sense of
the person behind it.” Overall, O’Brien uses Mary Anne as an example of how
extensively war can corrupt a person.
 A shift to a setting of normality further displays that war can have such
an effect on a person that they cannot forget the experiences of the war and
rejoin society. Norman Bowker is a prime example of this. He returns home
very much traumatized by the war, with guilt about “how he had not been so
brave as he wanted to be.” weighing on his shoulders. When he returns home
after the war, he drives endlessly around a lake, “Clockwise, as if in orbit,”
taking his father’s “Chevy on another seven-mile turn around the lake.” This
serves as symbolism for not letting go of his past, as he goes around on the
road, not driving anywhere else, showing that he is trapped in a loop. This
inability to leave the past is shown again, when Norman Bowker goes to order
food. After the intercom cuts, Bowker says, “Out.”, which, though subtle, shows
that he cannot act as a normal person would, but is still trapped in the
memories and habits of the war. Also, while at the restaurant, Bowker
displays that he is not familiar with the norms of the present, not
understanding that “rootie tootie” means “root beer”. Moreover, Bowker’s
yearning to talk about the war, yet inability to, shows how he cannot rejoin
society. While in Vietnam, Bowker and his colleagues would only talk about
the war. However, now that he is back at home in a setting of normality,
nobody wants to talk about war, though Bowker very much wants to tell them
about it. Bowker imagines himself telling his father how he “could've won the
Silver Star for valor”. He also imagines telling his ex-girlfriend, Sally Kramer,
“about the night they bivouacked in a field along the Song Tra Bong.” He
realizes that she would not want to hear about it, and states that “this was not
a story for Sally Kramer.” Moreover, Bowker wants to tell a worker at a
restaurant about what happened in the war, yet reminds himself that he
“could not talk about it and never would.” He also adds that if asked the
people if they wanted to hear about the war, “the place could only blink and
shrug. It had no memory, therefore no guilt.” In the end, the trauma peaks, and
Bowker hangs himself. Overall, Norman Bowker shows that war can change a
person so much that they can no longer be part of the society.
In The Things They Carried, O’Brien uses setting to display the extent to
which war can change people. With Kiowa, we see a desensitization of death,
with war taking away a central human value from him. Moreover, Mary Ann
becomes a killer, losing all morality, displaying a complete corruption by the
war. Finally, O’Brien uses Norman Bowker to show that no matter how much
time passes, the effect of the war lives on, eventually leading to Bowker’s
death. Altogether, war destroys people, having life-changing effects on them.