Puppy and Baby Water Buffalo the Things They Carried
Symbols
Course Hero Literature Instructor Russell Jaffe explains the symbols in Tim O'Brien's brusque story drove The Things They Carried.
The Things They Carried | Symbols
O'Brien uses symbolism throughout the volume to convey truths near both the profound and the mundane experiences of war.
What Must Exist Carried
The drove and the first story share a title, "The Things They Carried," that points to the importance of what the men conduct during the war and subsequently, when some of the soldiers notice that they cannot lay downward the burdens of war. The catalogs of things carried that shape the first story are the most obvious explorations of the literal and symbolic significance of the men's burdens, but the idea of the burdens of state of war appears in many forms throughout the stories.
The men carry the physical objects that, to them, hateful survival. But they carry intangibles too—emotions, memories, and responsibilities to each other, to their allies, and to history. The stories reveal the effect of having to carry these burdens into the years later on the war. Things equally light as Martha's letters and photos and as heavy as the narrator'southward guilt over Kiowa'due south death demonstrate the war'due south impact on the men's lives.
The State
The narrator says, in the title story, that the soldiers "carried the land itself"—its jungles, rivers, fog, mountains, even sky. The land of Vietnam is more than a setting; information technology is some other character in the war and thus in the stories, and information technology haunts the American soldiers: "The whole country. Vietnam. The identify talks. ... It truly talks."
The land also takes on symbolic value: sometimes an enemy and other times a seductive force, the land can represent home or tomb, beauty, or brutality. This contradictory symbolism makes sense, given the stories' historical context. The Vietnamese landscape overwhelmed the U.S. military power that had prevailed in earlier wars. In The Things They Carried, Vietnam's jungles, mountains, fog, and rain can be beautiful merely mortiferous too. Even the loveliest stretch of ground can conceal land mines.
The land is so powerful that it consumes several of the characters, including Kiowa, who is swallowed live in a muddy field, and the narrator, whose "cruelty" toward another soldier briefly causes him to become Vietnam ("I was the state itself."). Mary Anne Bell, who wants to swallow Vietnam, is devoured past it instead, when she vanishes into the jungle, never to be seen once again.
The Man I Killed
The man whom the narrator killed symbolizes the futility of war and the needless loss of life and potential on both sides of any conflict. The qualities that the narrator imposes on the dead man are similar to the traits he uses to describe himself; information technology could have been the narrator, or any of his fellow soldiers, lying there. The men are nearly interchangeable, thus highlighting that both countries were needlessly losing men who had aspirations and futures.
The Rainy River
The Rainy River, where the narrator experiences his moral dilemma almost running to Canada or reporting for duty, sets upward the three stories that deal with the death of Kiowa. While it is not raining in "On the Rainy River," the name of the river connects the narrator'southward prewar dilemma with the moral dilemma faced during the monsoon and the shelling that sucks Kiowa into the muck. The Rainy River comes to symbolize courage. In "On the Rainy River," the narrator decides to go to state of war because he is a coward; he is besides embarrassed not to get: "I would go to the war—I would kill and maybe dice—considering I was too embarrassed not to." For him bravery is doing what he believes is right: "the shore just twenty yards away, I couldn't make myself be brave." In "Speaking of Courage," Norman Bowker grapples with similar issues of backbone. Despite winning seven medals, he discounts them because they were for "the routine, daily stuff—just humping, just enduring." He almost won the Silver Star for uncommon valor but he permit go of Kiowa because he could not stand the stench of the latrine field. Norman wishes he could accept explained "how he had been braver than he always thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be." The Things They Carried has a fluid definition of a hero and what information technology ways to be brave.
The Baby Water Buffalo
The babe water buffalo is one of the volume's near poignant symbols of the terrible event of war on the soldiers. After the death of 1 of their fellow soldiers, Short Lemon, the men find a baby buffalo and take it with them. Brusque's expiry has had a potent event on the men, and 1 in particular, Rat Kiley, projects his frustrations onto the innocent, young fauna. At first Rat offers the h2o buffalo food, only, when it doesn't accept information technology, he shoots information technology, not in one case but repeatedly, in unlike parts of its torso, as the other soldiers look on. Some of them finally pick upwards the dying beast and throw it down a well. The infant water buffalo is symbolic of the innocence and youth of the soldiers themselves before they were confronted with the horrors of war that accept torn them apart psychologically, piece by terrible piece. The baby h2o buffalo also represents not only what the young soldiers have lost but also how violence has become so much a function of the fabric of the soldiers' lives. They appear almost indifferent to violence, while standing to suffer deeply below the surface. What happens to the h2o buffalo symbolizes the soldiers' try to limited their pain most violence and expiry—through violence and decease—and the futility of doing so.
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