"The Things They Carried"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how a primary theme of "The Things They Carried" is baggage and burdens - both physical and mental in nature. It looks at how the things that the characters carry in the story function in both a literal and figurative nature. While all of the characters carry heavy physical loads during the war, they also carry heavy emotional loads, such as love, sadness, longing, and of course, fear. It also discusses how the physical loads that the characters carry throughout the story have certain significance to the emotional baggage that each character carries.

From the Paper:

"The characters in "The Things They Carried" possessed emotional baggage from the start of the war, as was evident in the letters that Jimmy Cross carried, and the New Testament that Kiowa carried, which connected to their pre-war lives. However, with war came emotional baggage that occurred during the war, on top of the previous burdens that the characters may have experienced. Jimmy Cross was a leader of a group of men at war, however when Tim Lavender, a young, scared soldier who embodied the fear that all of the soldiers shared, died, Jimmy Cross felt a great amount of responsibility for it. Cross felt that his longing for love and his obsession with Martha's letters got in the way of him being able to do his job correctly, and the fact that Lavender's death was preventable (which also displayed how expendable lives are in war), made Cross change forever. "

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