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Psychological Warfare In Tim O 'Brien's The Things They Carried'

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Psychological Warfare in The Things They Carried
Unless you have been in war or have read The Things They Carried , you can't fully understand the psychological toll on a person's mind and body, you can't understand the psychological hardship soldiers go through in war. However, The Things They Carried , by Tim
O'Brien, is written to where it shows the overall psychological effects of war on soldiers in and out of Vietnam; as shown throughout the story, the recurring themes of trauma, love, and guilt give the clear psychological implications of war.
The tribulation the soldiers have to endure with all the violence in O'Brien's novel brings a tremendous slap of psychological trauma in their lives. This psychological trauma has been …show more content…

Guilt is an emotion that O’Brien wanted to bluntly throw at the reader because the guilt is something a lot of soldiers faced in and out of war. There are multiple examples of the guilt in this book of all the trauma and all the love,the guilt starts to find its way into the characters. Continuing this, O’Brien runs with the psychological theme of guilt, and he does this masterfully. "They carried shame for almost dodging the draft. The weights they carried couldn’t be left behind and for some of the soldiers in O’Brien’s unit, they carried these intangible weights for more than twenty years after returning home from war"(Clark). There are multiple examples of the guilt in this book, that match with this quote. The first examples would lie within the first character during the war, Jimmy Cross. After he losses Ted Lavender by a sniper shot he Acosta 3 begins to feel the guilt of the death and tries to blame it on his love for Martha. The second example hits home when Norman Bowker kills himself due to the guilt psychological killing his will to live with the burden of him knowing he could have saved his fellow soldier, Kiowa. Both of these examples from the book show how O’Brien bluntly shows the guilt in and out of

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