#20 last one!

For my last bl0g, I'm not quite sure what i want to blog about. I did the literary terms and blogged about some other characteristics of the novel. I guess for my last one I will make a connection between my blog title and the book as a whole. When I first made my blog title, i had not yet started reading. But as I was going through, I realized that the three words (peace, hope, and love) are brought out in The Things They Carried. In every war, people only want there to be peace. At the camps, amongst soldiers, there needs to be a sense of peace to accomplish the great tasks. The people have hope that they will one day be out of danger. Mark Fossie hoped that Mary Anne would come back to her normal self and Jimmy Cross hoped that Martha would truly love him. Lastly, love. Love is present in just about everything. In this book, there are three accounts thast stick out where the author talks about love and romance. Tim and Laura, Jimmy and Martha, Mark and Mary Anne are the three situations. So, in the end my title truly does relate to the novel. It's funny how things tend to work out :]

#19 Metaphor

On page 21, Tim O'Brien compares a plane to a bird. "but it was more than a plane, it was a real bird, a big sleek silver bird with feathers and talons and high screeching. They were flying." During war, so many people just wanted to leave. They would dream of hurting themselves just so they could ride to safety away from the maddness on a "freedom bird." The freedom birds were airplanes. When anyone got injured or died, they were taken to Japanese hospitals to be taken care of. They wanted to feel light and free away from the disaster. By including this metaphor into the story, it creates a visual for the readers to picture. Also, it elaborates how badly some of those people wanted out of their. THey wanted to soar like a bird-planes were the way to feel like that.

#18 Things to Carry

In the first chapter, we come to know all the things that the characters carry. [hints the title] You never understand what items are truly carried. There are not just tangible things that need to be carried, but the intangibles as well. I will have to say that the first chapter kind of got boring after reading the millionth thing that a person carried. The items were broken down into categories: necessity, sentimentals, rank and specialty, weapons, missions, and superstition. Every character had his own set of ideal things to carry. It was interesting finding out what each treasured the most. The one that stuck out to me the most was life. A person has to carry themself before they can carry anything else. "..and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and the unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at loss for things to carry." This quote proves that no matter the weather, age, day, time, or person there is always something that someone has to carry. This is true for our world today. It does not just have to be war, daily life requires numerous items to be carried.

#17 War itself

The Things They Carried is a novel written about war. On almost every page it talks about this event. Fights, misunderstandings, and wars happen all over the world and have for many centuries. While reading this book, I discovered that the events happening in the book are happening in our lives today. The fallen heroes in the book are just like the fallen heroes in the wars past. This book is not all true, but in a way it seems as if it could be. The writer titles his main character his exact same name. He speaks of Vietnam and we all know the Vietnam War. We know of the deaths and the victories. War is a sad and scary thing. Losing people close to you is one of the hardest things someone will endure. In the book, Curt Lemon, Ted Lavender, Kiowa and others were killed. It hits hard knowing that those things are happening to our troops today.

#16 Stories

All along throughout the book I knew I was reading a story. Along the way, the author would add in certain comments general stories themselves.
"The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might dream along with you..." (page 218)
"But this too is true: stories can save us." (page 213)
"What stories can do, I guess, is make things present." (page 172)
"the stories that will last forever are those that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane." (page 85)
"Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except a story." (page 36)
All of these quotations prove something special about stories. They are what keep people in tune and allow people to cherish memories. Stories are the source of all things. They can be passed down and told and retold in many ways more than one.

#15 Heroes

In society today, we think of heroes as people who save others lives and do something amazing for someone else. This may be true, but there are more heroes in the world than we give credit to. On page 45, it reads, "The man who opened the door that day is the hero of my life." O'Brien was saying this about Elroy Berdahl. He was a quiet old man who owned the place where Tim stayed for awhile. During this time, he was running away from going to war. The old man some how knew what was taking place. He was a hero to Tim by means of letting him figure out for himself what the best action was to take on the war subject. He never came out and told Tim what he thought was best but rather gave him insight. That man changed Tim's life forever and that is why he calls him a hero. We all have heroes in our lives even if we overlook them. The simplest things someone does that has a huge impact on life is considered a hero in my eyes.

#14 Flashback

A flashback is a scene that interrupts the normal chronological sequence of events in a story to depict something that happened at an earlier time. Throughout the novel, numerous flashbacks fill the pages. Without adding these important flashbacks, the book would have given off a different message. Flashbacks are little stories and memories that help relate to the reader why something is the way it is or how they came to be. In the chapter Enemies, we learn of Jensen and Strunk's fight. The author added this in to show how people act toward eachother. Also, in the chapter Friends, the author proceedsto tell us how they worked through their differences and became cordial with eachother. Without having the prior flashback, the readers would be confused as to why they werent best friends. Anothe time in the book where we experience a flashback is when he tells us of how he came to be a part of the war. He states, "i saw a seven-year-old boy... I saw a twelve-year-old boy...I saw a sixteen-year-old boy...". These were events that flashed before him and to the reader we understand where he came from.