The Things They Carried by Tim O' Brian - Essay Example

Each of them finds many things to blame, and they all, at times, also blame themselves. Two characters in particular highlight the struggle for a way to apportion blame, namely the soldier Norman Bowker and the author/narrator Tim O’Brien. This paper explains that the point of the book is to illustrate how soldiers should accept personal responsibility only for confessing the truth about what happened, and allocate all the blame and guilt to collective or impersonal agencies like chance, nature, god, or the human condition.

The character of Norman Bowker represents a thinking soldier who goes through a fairly standard Vietnam War experience. His thoughtful nature is illustrated at the start of Speaking of Courage when his younger self is depicted “talking about urgent matters, worrying about the existence of God and theories of causation” (p. 132). These are quite normal preoccupations for a teenager, and it is stressed that this theoretical speculation takes place before there was any sign of the war, in the beautiful countryside of his youth.

Even in this idealized, innocent state, Bowker notes that futile tragedy could occur. He reports “the lake had drowned his friend Max…” (p.132). After the war is over, Norman is haunted by what he sees as his own guilt in the death of his comrade in arms Kiowa. He thinks that if he had acted differently, maybe he could have done something, but he has difficulty expressing himself to the civilians around him. He thinks they will not understand, and, as his mother puts it he does not want to be a bother to them.

Norman writes to the Tim O,Brien/narrator character asking for Tim, who is a writer, to tell the story of “the terrible killing power of that shit field” (p. 153). He is referring here to the stinking muddy field into which the noble character Kiowa’s dead body sank. On one level, then, Norman realises that that the natural