Myth of Courage Exposed in The Things They Carried Essay

Ah for a young man all looks fine and noble if he goes down in war, hacked to pieces under a slashing bronze blade he lies there dead. . .but whatever death lays bare all wounds are marks of glory. (Homer 22.83-87) As students we are brainwashed by ancient myths such as The Iliad, where war is extolled and the valorous warrior praised. Yet, modern novels such as Tim OBriens The Things They Carried (THINGS) challenge those very notions. Like The Iliad, THINGS is about war. It is about battles and soldiers, victory and survival, yet the message OBrien gives us in THINGS runs almost contradictory to the traditional war story. Whereas traditional stories of war take place on battlefields where soldier battles soldier and†¦show more content†¦What the reader experiences while reading the novel, is entirely different from what he expects from a typical war story. Absolutes must be absent from the text, if OBrien is to illustrate how any of our mythologies, including courage, frequently fail to meet up to actual experience. As many have noted, OBrien ingeniously facilitates a mood of incongruity, or disconnection, between fiction and fact in The Things They Carried through sheer structure. By blurring lines between fantasy and reality, THINGS truly becomes a contradiction of itself. As Catherine Calloway notes, one of the ways in which OBrien achieves this blurring of lines, is to model the narrator of THINGS after himself, a drafted Vietnam war veteran, a Harvard graduate, and a writer with the same name of Tim OBrien (para. 3). OBrien is aware that the practiced reader knows not to confuse the narrator with the author, and yet the reader is encouraged to do just that. The purpose, of course, is to keep the reader as unbalanced, as unsure, of what we are told to be truths, as is the Vietnam soldier. Another way in which OBrien blurs fiction and fact is through his narrators (heretofore referred to as Tim), constant and contradictory claims as to the veracity of his stories. One moment Tim swears that a story is true, such as in the chapter The Man I Killed, when he speaks so realistically and in such detail, about killing an enemy soldier (THINGS 141), butShow MoreRelatedGreek Gods and Goddesses2478 Words   |  10 Pagesonly to Zeus, in power and importance. Poseidon was the Ruler of the Sea and gave the first horse to man. His nickname, The Earth-Shaker, was given to him because of his ability to shake and shatter what he pleased with his trident that he always carried. (Hamilton 27-28) He was portrayed as a man with less serene features, a thick beard, and disorderly hair. (Guirand 151) br brHades was also the son of Cronus and Rhea. 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