Contrasting Images In The Things They Carried

The things they carried is a work of Tim O’Brien, a historical fiction about the Vietnam war. With captivating and powerful language, O’Brien has succeeded in bringing readers back to the time, breathing and living the atmosphere of Vietnam, feeling the true image of the war. Although most of the time the war is ugly and gruesome, the author also gives readers another view of it with beautiful sketches of nature and emotions amid the chaos that the soldiers have to suffer, especially in the scene of Curt Lemon dying, the portrayal of Rat Kiley killing a young buffalo and the description of the young man that O’Brien kills.

The death of Curt Lemon in “How to tell a true war story” is one of the most saddening but also beautiful scenes in the book. O’Brien describes Curt Lemon as if he has been saved by the light: “His face was suddenly brown and shining. A handsome kid, really. Sharp gray eyes, lean and narrow-waisted, and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a true full of moss and vines and white blossoms” (O’Brien 67). Along with his death, Dave Jensen is singing the mellow and lovely song – “Lemon tree”. O’Brien never mentions the blood and carnage even when he was forced to climb up the tree to throw down Curt Lemon’s body parts. He focuses more on the sunlight than the carnage, making the death beautiful but also unspecific and separated. In this way, O’Brien can deal with the loss of his friend and deal with the complexity of the war experience more easily, making sense of the death of Curt Lemon. His death is devastating, but it is also one of the most lovely images throughout the whole novella. 

Rad Kiley mourns for his best friend by shooting the baby buffalo is disturbing but at the same time a heart-warming scene. Rat is depicted as immoral right after Curt Lemon dies by hurting the buffalo: “…and Rat took careful aim and shot off an ear. He shot it in the hindquarters and in the little humps at its back. He shot it twice in the flanks. It wasn’t to kill; it was to hurt” (O’Brien 76). He shoots the baby buffalo because he has no where to place his anger and because Rat is unable to deal with his feelings effectively. Nonetheless, the despair of Rat Kiley, the imagery of his crying later shows how much he treasures and longs for his best friend, and that’s one of the most beautiful friendships in literature. It turns the story from a horrible, gruesome war experience to a love story, which is what O’Brien wants readers to understand while reading the book.

For constracting images, it cannot go without mentioning the scene of the young dead man in the chapter “The man I killed”, which is brutal but also accompanied by the beauty of nature right next to it. Throughout the whole chapter, O’Brien keeps coming back to the description of the man he kills with the “star-shaped hole” in his eyes, his “cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips”, “his head cocked at wrong angle”, his “neck wet with blood” again and again. He both consoles and tortures himself by imagining a fantasy that he shares with the man. His guilt takes on on its own way in the repitition of ideas, phases, and observations. On the other hand, the beautiful butterfly and the blue flowers cannot be ignored among the grotesque and cruel scene. It shows the suddeness and unnaturalness of war amid nature. In addition, it also implies that life goes on despite such tragedy. The flowers don’t shrivel up; the butterfly doesn’t go away. They stay and find their home around the disastrous event, which is heart-breaking among all those beauty. The depiction of the dead man might not be as horrifying as when Rat Kiley shoots the baby buffalo, but it is one of the most saddening images of the novel.

In conclusion, Tim O’Brien not only portrays the destructive and disastrous reality of the war, but also the liveliness, the beauty and the heavy emotions underneath. Ass a war story is never about the war itself, these images carry various meanings that readers have to look at the contrast  and most important of all, have to “listen” to understand the purpose Tim O’Brien wants to deliver.