PS：If you want to read Tim O'brien's <The Things They Carried> on your computer, I can offer a copy organized by Microsoft Word. Please contract me by E-mail: xinjing90@163.com
这是我说的另一篇论文，是英语季度考的一部分。相对于政府课的论文这个要容易得多，毕竟我对无政府主义的了解仅限于其名所能体现的意义，而The ThingsThey Carried毕竟是我们当成课本学了一遍的小说，加之我对文学比对政治更感冒。这样的情况下，本来要求三页的文章我呼哧呼哧写到第三页末都没有刹住车。
The ThingsThey Carried是一部由美国退役军人Tim O'Brien写的关于越战的小说，这本书十年来一直居全美作品榜前十名。这是一部从第一人称的角度出发，讲述越战时期士兵生活的故事，旨在反应战争对人们的伤害，和从战争中走出的人是怎样不为人所理解和如何难以适应平静的生活。
Jing Xin
Mr. Cosca
English III Period 3
10/20/2008
Those Things They Carried
War movies and stories make everyone feel bad but are able to grab people firmly as well as they are drugs. People can’t help loving it somehow. So it is fortunate to read Tim O’Brien’s fiction, The Things They Carried because it is one of the world’s most famous and awesome novels about war. This is a story about narrator O’Brien’s experiences during Vietnam War and effects on soldiers including him. When reading the first few parts of this story, many people may wonder why the name of the book can be chosen from the title of the first chapter. After all, the whole story is not about what soldiers carries. However, after finishing this whole book, it becomes clear that what soldiers carry are three things: they carry panic of going to the war before heading toward Vietnam; they carry pressure of death during the war; and they carry the memory that they don’t want but can not be got rid of after the war. This is the idea throughout the whole book and it is exactly the reason that Tim O’Brien gives this book such a name for his book..
Before going to the Vietnam War, indubitability, boys who are ordered to set off for the battle field faraway sticks in a condition of chaos and panic in the mind because war is a thing that makes people kill others and be in danger of being killed. When it makes people, actually, in this war, people at ages around twenty, face death, most of them find they never meets it before. Most of them are still drawing a beautiful future for themselves. They think they still have a far longer way to go than their grandpas. However, a draft notice brings them things they never think about——someday they may die on the battle field, probably, only in one or two seconds and even do not have time to pity themselves that their futures no longer make sense and turn dust. “I did not want to die. Not ever. But certainly not then…” This is a very direct description of Tim O’Brien’s at that time in the chapter of On The Rainy River. What’s more, O’Brien asks a series of questions about the purpose of Vietnam War in the same chapter, “Was it a civil war? A war of national liberty or simple aggression? Who started, and when, and why? What really happened to the USS Maddox on that dark night in the
If it is a bitter pill to swallow that someone is required to go to a war he really hates, it surely proves more difficult to be really in the war. First, fear fills up the whole body and mind. If it is not easy to imagine the condition, Bobby Jorgenson is a good example to pull out. In The Ghost Soldiers, the narrator made such a description, “So when I got shot the second time, in the butt, along the Song Tra Bong, it took the son of a bitch (Jorgenson) almost ten minutes to work up the nerve to crawl over to me.” And then as Jorgenson himself said later in this chapter, “… (I) Got all frozen up, I guess. The noise and shooting and everything——my first fire fight——I just couldn’t handle it…I felt miserable. Nightmares, too. I kept seeing you lying out there, heard you screaming, but I couldn’t make my goddamn legs work.” Wars just have invisible but strong force that make people can neither think nor move or make some poor guys inject ataractic like what Ted Lavender does. If someone can get use to the fear, to kill people makes him guilty, always. In The Man I Killed and Ambush, O’Brien keeps describing how the young man he killed looks like and it must goes over and over in his mind like a piece of film. He just can not get over it.
In The Things They Carried, the war seems a game with his facetious writing. However, Speaking Of Courage and Notes is a little depressing. Postwar story seems popular among war story writers because memory of war is cruel and affective. The word “would’ve” in Speaking Of Courage is unforgettable. Norman Bowker wants to say something but he does not know how to describe it, or whom to talk to. There is an interesting thing: on page 147, there is, “Still, there was so much to say.” And then on page 153, it says, “There was nothing to say.” Are these two fragments contradictory? No, they aren’t. Of course there is too much to say because the war, it is such a complicated thing and Norman Bowker is still in the pain of losing his friend. But who can understand his feeling? Who understands the war without going through it? No one understands it. Sure at this moment he has nothing to say and he just shares his stories with himself and later one day he can not stand any more and hangs up and kills himself.
Going for the war and fighting in the war and coming back form the war and getting in the trouble of aftereffect, not bravely accept the war, not brandishing the flag with proud on the battle field, not being regarded as a hero upheld by people after the war. This is a true war story. They carry too much things: fear of going to the war, pressure of death, and depressing memories. That is what The Things They Carried is all about and surely it should be the name of this book. Noises, gunshots, and many things else just keep filliping our nerve. And what we can never forget is the panic, the death, and the memory, and that is those what they carry.
