Blog Feed

Lindsey Jones 1/13/15

A Changing World

The world is a forever changing place, physically and metaphorically for each human being. Events that dramatically affect that the way a person lives their life can trigger many different reactions in the human psyche. People can be  unsure about how to react to change during this time. One reaction is to try to gain control. When someone does not want to accept change, they grasp onto as much control of their lives as possible, even when everything seems to be out of control. People cope with change in theirs lives by controlling aspects of it.

The novel, the Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers contains the round trip journey of a young man named Bartle to and from the war in Iraq. Bartle, and several of his comrades deal with the power of change that the war creates. Bartle, unsure about his place in the war, and reason he enlisted, tries to gain control of himself by confiding in a younger comrade, Murph, one of the youngest and most naive in the group, suffers the ultimate fate when he isn’t able to gain control of his condition. Sterling, the most openly aggressive and confident in the war, uses this as his method to stay in control of the forever weighing war.

In the beginning of the book, Bartle opens with a tired and cryptic position about the war. He is in the middle of his service of the war, and he mentions how it was one of the several days that the war tried to kill him. It was just another day in his mind. Murph and Bartle are the middle of shootout against the enemy and just when he was about to panic, he remembers Murph.

”Murph’s breath was a steady comfort to my right. I had grown accustomed to it” Page 6.

Bartle uses Murph as a comfort during his time in war. His mindset the entire time, being depressed about the war and only trying to survive is his way of reacting to the condition he has been put in. Bartle is in a completely new world which he has no control over. But with Murph’s presence, he feels soothed. Murph is Bartle’s symbol of control. He initially starts out not knowing who Murph is, but uses Murph as his entire motivation to continue in the war. Behind almost every decision and thought he has, is Murph’s well being is in mind.

Aside from Bartle using Murph as a pacification for the change in his life, Sterling uses his own stamina. Sterling comes across as aggressive and unlikeable when he is first introduced. The condition that the war has caused for he and his comrades seem to be completely natural for him. This is why when Murph disappears and stops talking to the group, Sterling seems to be above addressing it. Bartle, worried and wanting to comfort Murph, is told to stop by Sterling.

“If you get back to the States in your head before your ass if there too, then you are fucking dead man. I’m you. You don’t where Murph keeps going, but I do.”-Sterling, page 156

In this quote, he bad mouths Murph for losing his own control of himself. Based on this, Sterling clearly understands the effects of what not adjusting to the changing world means. People will lose themselves. This is Sterling’s sense of control in the changing world. He puts off feeling the emotions and natural reactions of shooting a gun or seeing a decapitated body and takes it in stride instead. He sees Murph as an example of what could happen if the control is lost.

The effects of the changing world take a toll on Bartle’s life. Murph breaks down and ends up dying a gruesome death after he completely loses himself in the war; which in turn affects Bartle. Sterling and Bartle both do not want Murph’s body to return to the U.S. in such a condition and get rid of the body by dumping it in a river, which later lands Bartle in jail for the not returning the body. Bartle’s mind is in another place during these events. He doesn’t seem to care that he is in jail or what the world is like outside. When Murph’s mother comes to confront him, he feels unworthy of seeing her.

“I eventually accepted the fact that everything eventually falls away from everything else” page 217.

Bartle begins to question everything. Murph, his only symbol of control is gone, and now he is in a new environment where the only thing he can control is his mind. Bartle succumbs to the idea that everything is the way it is because of has to be. Regardless of the obstacles that interfere with destiny, nothing is permanent, not even the control he had over the change in his life.

Kevin Powers, the author, wrote Yellow Birds during his service in the war. His position on his participation and reasoning for being in the war is similar to Bartles, unsure. Despite the book being a work of fiction, Powers definitely expressed his stance on the changing world and himself.

“I didn't know that I was allowed to be a writer. I thought of it as something other people were able to do. I knew that I liked writing, but that felt meaningless. We didn't have a ton of money, and I certainly wasn't going to get a scholarship of any kind. My high school sweetheart's father was an army recruiter. We're still in touch.

My dad had served in the army, and both my grandfathers had served in the Second World War. I was fairly idealistic at the time.”

It was never Kevin Powers’ plan to enlist in the army; he was expected to go. This expectation extended from several generations of his family. His father, a military veteran, and both of his grandfathers were veterans of World War II, the beaming expectation for him to enlist made him feel that he didn’t have a choice in the matter. This signified the first part of change and loss of control within his originally comfortable world. While only being in Iraq for a few months, Powers found serenity in writing. He would lock himself in his bunk and write about his experiences in the war as well as his particular mind frame. It is clear that Powers was not used to the change in his life, as he was already unwilling and unsure about himself being in the war from the beginning. Writing was his control mechanism, and he was about to write several different characters that either learned how they could keep control on lose it.  

The forever changing world only gives people to either accept or fall apart. When people realize their world finally changing, good or bad, finding control is the only method of staying complete and together. The characters Bartle, Murph and Sterling are all embodiments of the changing world and what happens when you lose control. Kevin Powers used his own talent to escape the world of war and the possible changes it would bring him. Taking control of something or someone is the only way to keep from falling apart.

Works Cited for Analytical Essay:

Powers, Kevin. The Yellow Birds: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2012. Print

Whitman, Alice. "Printing - Kevin Powers, In and Out of Conflict - Interview Magazine." Printing - Kevin Powers, In and Out of Conflict - Interview Magazine. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2015. <http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/kevin-powers-letter-composed-during-a-lull-in-the-fighting/print/>.

Life has always been pretty consistent. I’ve always expected for my days to be an ever repeating cycle until some brash or sudden miracle would occur  that would make a dramatic change for me. But this isn’t to go without saying that nothing earth shattering or different has happened in my life that hasn’t made me have to change who I am or how I think or do things.

A key moment in my life where I experienced change was when my mom gave away her car and she and I had to reduce to riding in a tiny truck to school and work every morning.

This change might seem miniscule or unparalleled to those changes faced by Kevin Powers (author of the Yellow Birds) and Bart (main character from the Yellow Birds), but to me the effect of the change is no different.

When I first realized I had to be in such a small and confined space every morning, I would complain and find any reason to make the ride more difficult than it had to be.

“Don’t worry, it’ll just be for the winter.” Mom would say.

But time went on. I realized this change was going to last for some time and I needed to gain a sense of control in a suffocating environment. This triggered me to crack the window a tiny bit every morning ride. When the window was cracked, I felt like a bit of the vast world was being invited into the small space within the car. It calmed my nerves and helped me forget about the uncomfortable predicament. No one seemed to notice this, except for once:

It was below zero outside and the cold hugged my lungs with big grandma hugs, making it hurt to breathe. Walking 20 feet to the car was hassle that made it feel like sudden deathe was in the midst. I went through the usual routine making sure the car window was cracked and ready for the ride. My mother turned the key ignition and the dark dashboard came to life. She waited for a few seconds and then turned the heat on. But she noticed something different.

The windows were becoming frosted. She turned to me and say “Put the window up, it’s making the windows foggy.”

I quickly began rolling the handing. I knew she would say that. Darn frost. I watched as the window inched it’s way to the end of the frame and then stopped. I didn’t let it reach all the way. I pressed my face against the window and looked closely into the tiny corner where the window had about a few centimeters to go; I kept it like that. If I had twined that handle bar anymore and I would have been on the road to insanity in the teeny tiny clown car. Mother had her windows unfrosted and I still had the window crack to keep me comfortable. We were both happy.

Quotes on the Book

On a large scale, the world changing has little impact on the outcome of the universe. Of the 7 billion people on earth, a person’s impact to the Earth has even smaller impact. While the impact a person has on the universe may be very little, as a collective group, the impact it has on the world in which they live is very large. However true this may be, their efforts are done without true purpose, and are for the most part, done for the sake of doing it. The truth of the matter is, in real life not everyone is a main character.  

Within the first couple of pages, the story that The Yellow Birds had constructed so far had begun to build up a character. It seemed like he wasn’t just any random character, but instead somebody with a name, and a family. Malik was a student of literature, indigenous to Iraq, and the university of which he studied closed. With little opportunity to further his education he turned to America to become a translator for the U.S. troops. Malik, on the side he thought just, putting himself and his family’s life on the line, died shortly after first meeting the troops. Malik died and that was that, as if his entire back story didn’t matter. “ I didn’t think about Malik much after that.” (pg. 12, Bartle). No one cared about the death of Malik. Even though he had left himself vulnerable, and became acquainted with them, in the end his life didn’t make any impact. A living being took use of his talents and services, but when all was said and done, nothing really would have changed that much if he wasn’t even there at all. He was forgotten about, anyhow.

In the author’s note of the book I pulled out a quote that leads to answering the question of what it was like in war “over there”. In answering this question the author noted that war was pretty much unique, being only like itself. While noticing war’s uniqueness, he also noticed something about people.  “People, however, are all the same...” (Reading group guide pg. 2, Authors Note). The author, Kevin Powers, explained that in order to understand what it was like “over there” you must first understand that essentially all experiences are the same. No matter how different our experiences may seem, we are all as alike as our “breath and blood”. There is very little difference in any task we perform, because it really is in no way unique or special. This raises the thought, everything is just a repetition of itself. If it has already been done or felt before, there is really no sake in doing it.

Taking a step back from main characters, and how not everyone is one, we can take a look at one of the main characters of the book. Looking at the character Murph, it is easy to decode a sense of acting without true purpose. Going through the war, ending a countless number of lives, he died. The young man still had much of his youth, he had a life to return to after the war, much more he could have accomplished. Still he died, and life would have to reshape itself around that fact. Though, life had not reshaped that much, because the only way to deal with his death was to pretend “like it never happened Bartle. That’s the only way.” (pg. 211, Sterling.) This is what Sterling said to Bartle after they witness their comrade's dead body floating down the river. Murph’s life must have been of little importance if the only way to deal with his passing was to erase his very being from the existence of the earth. All Murph had done in the war must really have been for nothing.

The author explains a sort of powerlessness in Bartle through a few interviews he had based on this book. Bartle was not able to be good. Out of this inability to do (whatever he thought was) good, it can be said that he did didn’t have the impact he wanted it to have. This specifically is not to say that he was completely impactless, but it does say to him that his actions were meaningless. The quote states, “the root of his guilt was that he wanted to be good, and he tried to be good, but he failed. His conflict is between his desire to redeem that failure and his acceptance of complete powerlessness.” Powerlessness accurately describes a person failure to impact, thus describing Bartle’s ultimate meaningless even as a main character. This article explains how little Bartle’s impact on the world was, while in another article he mentions how impactless everything is in relation to any other thing. In this article he says, “It's trying to allow for multiple things to be happening at the same time…” “to be very narrowly focused on the interior experience, but also to have a sense of expansiveness…” “I find this push-pull between the microscopic and the telescopic…” “I'm trying to evoke that clash of small and large scales, and the difficulties of locating oneself. I'm interested in, Where am I?” When answering the question of why he moved around a lot in the book, Kevin Powers answered with “difficulties of locating oneself.” This quote brings a realization that many things are happening at one time. There is no one point in time, no one place on a map. In this expansiveness of a collective of the Universe, there is no one person qualified to be a main character. Kevin powers wanted to answer the question “where am I” in writing this book, and during this process he choose to write about characters with complete powerlessness. He chose to write about people who, in the end never really mattered. He chose to do so because in finding one’s self, you find that you aren’t the most important person in the world. You find that in reality, you’re powerlessness has little impact in the grand scheme of things, despite where you are or where you may end up to be.

The point of the thesis is to help people understand that no one is really that special, and that while it may seem that someone’s life doesn’t have any meaning and may be pointless; it can become clearer to understand that no one’s life really has any meaning. Everyone is in the same boat. There is not true importance to meaningness, because in reality there is no true point to anything at all.

Works Cited

Kevin Powers, The yellow birds

"Kevin Powers, In and Out of Conflict." Interview Magazine. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Jan. 2015.

http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/kevin-powers-letter-composed-during-a-lull-in-the-fighting#_

"An Exclusive Interview with Kevin Powers, Poet and Iraq War Veteran, about His Debut Novel, The Yellow Birds." Foyles. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2015.

Analytical Essay:

Everyone has a past. Everyone is also emotionally connected to their past in some way or another. The past can be what one willingly holds onto or what one is forever haunted by. Either way, these emotional burdens, stemming from someone’s past, always have some sort of effect on their life going forward and the lives of those around them. In most situations, it can be what one uses to help make life altering decisions. The emotional burdens others carry around are often used as motivations in their everyday life, positively and negatively affecting everyone in their path along with themselves.

In the middle of war it makes sense for soldiers to hold onto their past, considering their present isn’t something anyone would want to be living and their future isn’t guaranteed. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross held onto Martha, a lover from his past in which he used as motivation to get through the war. This motivation soon turned into a distraction, which wasn’t what was best for him and his men in the middle of a war zone. “Trouble, he thought - a cave-in maybe. And then suddenly, without willing it, he was thinking about Martha.” (page 11) In this situation, Martha is no longer the motivation to help get him through the war, but is a distraction to take him away from it. Because Cross is not fully present in the middle of this raid, as his mind takes him away from it to think of Martha, one of his men are killed. Cross forever blames himself for the death of Ted Lavender and he now has to learn to deal with this guilt for the rest of his life, showing how the emotional burden from his past negatively affected his and Ted Lavender’s futures.

Making the decision to head to war is a hard one and without some sort of motivation one might never make it. Sometimes the patriotic need to protect one’s country is enough motivation in itself to enlist, but for Tim O’Brien this wasn’t the case. He didn’t believe in the war and found no need to take part in it, but the shame he would feel of himself and of his reputation after his family, friends, and hometown found out that he fled from the war was enough motivation for him. “And right then I submitted. I would go to the war - I  would kill and maybe die - because I was too embarrassed not to.” (page 59) O’Brien was already on the run when he made his decision, he could have avoided it all and was close to it. But the people from his past and what they might think of him became his emotional burden, motivating him into the war. There, though, he met new people, experienced new things, and made friendships to last a lifetime, showing how the emotional burden from his past did, in a way, positively affect his future.

Tim O’Brien’s life wasn’t just affected by that one emotional burden, but a few, that seemed to have a trickle down effect. First, once again, it was being drafted.“My conscience kept telling me not to go, but my whole upbringing told me I had to. That horrible summer made me a writer. I don't know what I wrote. I've still got it, reams of it, but I'm not willing to look at it. It was just stuff - bitter, bitter stuff, and it's probably full of self-pity. But that was the beginning.''  The first emotional burden of thinking about being drafted motivated O’Brien to become a writer. It started it all. Then, when in doubt, the emotional burden of what his reputation would be if he fled caused for him to go to the war. There, he experienced things and people in which whose stories he could then let live on through his writing. Without either of these burdens many soldiers’ stories would have never been told.

War is a terrible thing, but surviving it can sometimes be even worse. For most survivors, war itself is enough of an emotional burden to affect their futures. Things they’ve seen and things they’ve done can’t be erased and it can replay in their minds for the rest of their lives. This can be a deadly past to have haunt someone. Norman Bowker was dealing with this burden every day since the war. The death of his war buddy, Kiowa, hit him hard and he never recovered. “ “Speaking of Courage” was written in 1975 at the suggestion of Norman Bowker, who three years later hanged himself in the locker room of a YMCA in his hometown in Central Iowa.” (page 155) This situation has its good and its bad. The emotional burden of the war left Norman in such a bad state that suicide became an option, one that he took, showing how it all had affected his life in such a negative way. But at the same time, the burden helped him motivate O’Brien to write a book full of the war stories Norman thought people had to know. After the war, O’Brien receives a letter from Norman Bowker describing how he doesn’t know how to make his life meaningful after the war. It also included the suggestion for him to write “Speaking of Courage”, telling the stories of good men who could no longer tell them themselves. Norman’s emotional burden did have some positive effects on the lives of others.

Sometimes the past is there to help, and sometimes, to haunt. In all scenarios, though, its effects are inevitable. The emotional burdens can positively and negatively affect someone’s life, and can sometimes even cause something bad for one but great for another. Either way, these burdens from the past can’t be escaped, whether it’s the person holding onto them, or, the person running from them. But it is always up to the person on how they will allow their past to affect and motivate their future.

Narrative Essay:

Entering the front door, I already knew what it was. Before I even seen the ripped up envelope on the counter addressed to my name, or the thick letter, folded into three sections, in his hand, I knew. I could just tell by the look on his face. I had never seen him so happy or so proud. This was supposed to be what I wanted, but I couldn’t shake that feeling of wishing that letter had got lost in the mail, wishing that it would never reach my house so I would not have to deal with the choice that was about to be laid out for me.

Ever since I was little I looked up to my father. I wanted to be everything he was and everything he wanted. One of the two I seemed to strive to accomplish early, whereas the other, I would never be able to.

My father is smart, he always was. And I wanted to be just like him. My father admired it. I think it’s because he feels he had created the monster. I remember, probably as clear as he does, my tiny, toddler body always crawling my way to his book shelves filled with all his old college books. Sitting on the fuzzy carpet in the living room, legs spread, back against the wall, book in lap covering my entire body, I pretended to know what the words said. Flipping through pages and spending enough time on each to make one actually question whether or not I understood some of it. He would tell my mother that I would grow up to be smart. I never had much trouble accomplishing that part, but the fact that besides wanting me to be smart, wanting me to have been a son made it impossible to please him.

Basketball shorts, a t-shirt, sneakers, along with my hair in the ponytail that it never left, was the everyday attire. Choosing to wrestle or throw the football around with the boys on the street while ignoring all the little girls having so much fun with their dolls as my dad watched from the step became a habit. He was as proud as my mother was appalled at the sight of my scraped knees, especially when I was forced to show them in the few occasions I had to wear a dress. But as hard as I tried to be the son that he wanted, there were always those incidents in which I would come running to him crying about something that apparently a little boy just would’ve shaken off, causing for the constant 8 words, “It would’ve been so much easier with sons”. My sister paid no mind to it, but every time he said it was a constant reminder that that was just something I could never achieve.

So I had to stick with being smart and trying my very best in school while also doing good in sports, even though he’d much rather be going to boys’ basketball games, to make him happy, and I did. But even that seemed to get old to him after a while. Running home with another honor roll ribbon on report card day or with stories from the game after a great win went from being responded to with such praise and interest to little “Good Jobs!” just to get me to shut up. Sometimes I wondered if he even realized how hard I tried at everything and just for him. It all never seemed to be good enough. And that is what seem to put a dent in our relationship.

I went from telling him every perk from my day to barely saying a word to him. I don’t even know if he noticed the change. His eyes still never left his laptop in which he worked on all hours of the day, and sometimes I felt that he was relieved he could now avoid the after school conversations in which he would have to pretend to care about. We began to fight about everything, we couldn’t even be in the same room as one another at times. Everyone else in the family said it was because we were the same person and that we were too much alike. This only made me want to show everyone that they were wrong. I now wanted to be nothing like him, which makes little sense saying out loud considering I still continued to do everything he wanted of me, always secretly trying to impress him, only now acting as if I could care less if he noticed. And for this I would never understand. Why I would still want to be like and impress someone who I had grown to hate at times was beyond me.

Our relationship only got worse, but I couldn’t shake the old habit of always feeling the need to impress him or make him proud. What he thought of me was in my head with every decision I made. But I was getting older now, and the decision began to get harder. Impressing him began to conflict with what I wanted.

It was the end of eighth grade now and the transition to high school was all anyone could talk about. The excitement of being in someplace new along with the expectations caused by the constant reminder from anyone looking back trying to relive the better days that “High school are the best years of your life!” made the last few months of grade school seem so long. But I sometimes tended to be more conflicted than excited. The best friends that I had grown up had known since the start of their schooling that they would attend Saint Neumann and Goretti high school to further the Catholic education we had since kids, but my parents were never really sure what they wanted me to do. But my father became very sure of it really fast. He became set on the idea of me going to a Science Leadership Academy in which I would know no one and essentially be surrounded with nerds, but “would receive the best education around”.

Then the letter came. I applied figuring I probably wouldn’t get in, always doubting. Just seeing his face I knew I got in. I hated the idea of it. I wanted to spend the best years of my life with my friends, but the habit of impressing him in the past became a burden I couldn’t shake. It still affected every decision I made, and it wouldn’t be any different for this one. I told him I would go without even thinking, the words just came out.

A junior now, getting straight A’s at one of the best schools around and having the best colleges as real possibilities for myself makes me realize that the choice I had made on the spot, without thinking, years ago had turned out to be a good one. High school is turning out to be some of the best years of my life by still being as close as ever with my Catholic school friends, and by also making some new ones with the “nerds” in which I never would have expected. It turns out that burden from my father had motivated me to make a decision that not only made us both happy in the end, but one that would be responsible for all of the positive things that happen in my future.

Analytical Essay:

As circumstances change around someone, so does their role in the world, and with the people around them. For example, as a former student goes to war, such as in the case of Jimmy Cross from The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, their role needs to change. Through the “obscenity and evil” of war, as the author O’Brien put it, Jimmy became the battle-hardened leader he was meant to be for his men.  As the world changes, the “self” changes and adapts to the world around itself, for example, creating strong leaders out of insecure dreamers like Jimmy Cross.

Jimmy Cross goes to war unprepared, he was still in the mindset of a college student who had fallen desperately in love. However, he was too weak with the leadership role he had been placed in, that one of his men died. “After Ted Lavender’s death [Jimmy Cross] reminded himself that his obligation was not to be loved, but to lead.” With the shock that comes from Lavender’s death, Lt. Cross takes the blame upon himself for what happened. He now sees what how he has to change himself, in order to handle the change around him. Up until that point, he wasn’t really the leader of Alpha Company, but a death was what made him “snap” and know what he had to do, and that he had to fulfill his obligations. He understood that his connection to Martha, among other things, made him too immature to fulfill his duty. He loved a far away woman who did not love him back far more than he cared for the men he was responsible for.

As Jimmy realizes that he has to forget about Martha, and fulfill his duty in Vietnam, he ponders about the many things he carries with him, from his love of Martha, to his good luck pebble. “It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.” As the world changes around them, soldiers are often forced by circumstance to do things that in the end are caused by a mixture of pent up anger, sadness, and, most importantly, fear. War, especially, consists of situations where soldiers have to choose between doing the “wrong” thing and surviving, or losing a battle/life while staying true to their original morals.

In the beginning, when Tim O’Brien describes how soldiers carry things through war, he describes the emotional baggage carried by soldiers. “They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.” As the world changes around them, soldiers are often not really fit for this change. Basic training will teach you how to use a gun, but it won’t teach you how to deal with all the obscenity and death around you. Adapting to being forced to go to Vietnam, men altered themselves to be able to kill and die, if only out of cowardice and fear. They didn’t want to be next. Jimmy, for example, had to become a leader to make sure he and his company weren't next.

Tim O’Brien, the author himself, went through extensive changes in his life when he was drafted into the Vietnam War, as well as witnessing his comrades go through such changes  as well. “Storytelling preceded war for Mr. O'Brien, or at least some kind of writing did. He grew up in the southern Minnesota town of Worthington -''the Turkey Capital of the World'' -and was there, a month out of Macalester College in St. Paul, when his draft notice arrived. He had always liked fiction, and books, but he had majored in political science and certainly had no intention to be a writer. His reaction to the draft notice still surprises him... ...That horrible summer made me a writer. I don't know what I wrote. I've still got it, reams of it, but I'm not willing to look at it. It was just stuff - bitter, bitter stuff, and it's probably full of self-pity. But that was the beginning.'' The war forced O’Brien to change. O’Brien had to now understand what life really was, and he had to learn who he was. He had to adapt to the changing circumstances around him, going from being a Political Science major, to a soldier in Vietnam. He went from being a carefree student, to someone who now had to be a soldier in order to truly face the realities of war.

Change in the world around the self is the primary catalyst for change and evolution in the self. For example, as a former student goes to war, such as in the case of Jimmy Cross from The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, their role needs to change. Through the “obscenity and evil” of war, as the author O’Brien put it, Jimmy became the battle-hardened leader he was meant to be for his men.

Works Cited for Analytical Essay:

Bruckner, D.J. "A Storyteller For the War That Won't End." New York Times Online. The New York Times. April 3, 1990. Web. October 20, 2009.

O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway, 1998. Print.

Narrative Essay:

Willpower. Leadership. Adaptation. Duty. Obligation. These are the traits of not only many people throughout history, but also Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. Jimmy stands for the people that have had no choice, but to change, stand up, and fulfill their duty. I personally identify with Jimmy Cross the most, because I have had to learn how to lead a group of people, and I had to change myself and the way I look at the world in order to do it effectively. We have to learn to adapt to our circumstances, in order to make the most of them.

Around May of last year, I was put in charge, made student leader, of an ambitious TFI youth program, where a group of SLA students design and build exhibit prototypes using new Virtual Reality technology. I personally chose most of them for the project. I was given my position due to extensive familiarity with necessary technologies, as well as the drive to communicate with those who could support us. I thought I could do this. I mean, if I had given them tasks, they should do them, like teachers do in school right?

I was always shy and meek, even in the beginning of high school. Me, a leader? Who would have thought? I was able to navigate the intricacies of the non-profit bureaucracy, granted I was able to keep my wits about me, but the actual implementation was the hard part. It’s really hard to get people to be committed to something. It’s hard to properly organize without things eventually devolving into barking orders, unless you know what you’re doing.

We weren’t really productive in the beginning. I had made a roadmap, and standard operation procedures. But really, who just wanted to follow tasks, unless it was for a grade? And all I could think was, why wasn’t this working? But those early days were valuable, if only for the experience provided.

I was then given the advice by my mentor, that Leadership was achieved by inspiring others to do things, not telling them to do things. I thought about it for a bit, and then everything made sense. People had to have a personal stake in what they were doing. They had to care about it. So I went back the next day, and I set to work inspiring morale. I used fun activities, and I focused on valuing everyone's opinion.

I was made a leader by the circumstances at hand, not because of innate natural ability. At the end of the day, this process is applied to many other roles, but the core lesson is this, you become what the world needs you to be as time goes on. And I have thus evolved from the technological savant to the “brilliant” and “charismatic” leader I supposedly am today. Hell, recently I was called a “real ball of fire” who’s “going to become a great corporate leader one day”.

Each day decisions are made, and whether a person chooses right or left, there are always consequences. In a rapidly changing world, decisions become harder to make, especially when it comes to the question of adaptation. A changing world expels the individual from their comfort zone, often completely alienating them from the people or things they are used to. That alienation only  allows for two decisions: adaption or a refusal to accept the change. Either way decisive action must be taken, but a resistance to adapt often results in poor actions.

Towards the middle of the book O’Brien writes the story of how his character was shot. The platoon was taking on heavy fire and Tim was shot in his backside. The medic on call was a new soldier and he didn’t know how to handle treating a bullet wound while under fire just yet. So, he accidentally let Tim slip into shock. Tim was sent to a sort of base camp, far from the action, where he recovered. The first time that he sees his former comrades, he has this to say, “In a way I envied him--all of them. Their deep bush tans, the sores and blisters, the stories, the in-togetherness. I felt close to them, yes, but I also felt a new sense of separation...You become a civilian. You forfeit membership in the family, the blood fraternity, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t pretend to be part of it. That’s how I felt--like a civilian--and it made me sad. These guys had been my brothers. We’d loved on another.”(pg.194) This is the first time O’Brien has been with his fellow soldiers since he was discharged with his injury. His world has changed dramatically because he isn’t an active soldier anymore. However, he did not expect to feel so outside and outcast from the people that he describes as his “blood brothers.” This sends him into a small sort of depression. All the times that they are together he still feels outside of the group. Because of the change in his world he still feels lonely even in a room full of his former brothers. People crave consistency in others. O’Brien thought that these men would stand by him always, under any given circumstances. Their new camaraderie with the medic that so drastically changed his world sends O’Brien into a tailspin. Instead of accepting that Bobby Jorgenson (medic) was now a part of the group and that he was not, he lashed out violently against Jorgenson. He can’t accept his new world, so he fights it. This only further shows the difference between him and the other soldiers, as Jorgenson is now one of them and they treat him like a “blood brother.” Tim does not get back on the inside and he fractures the relationships more than they were in the first place.

O’Brien writes a story close to his own in the book about the summer when he got drafted. As a smart college kid, destined to go to Harvard on a full scholarship, he didn’t deal with the draft notice well. “I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldn’t happen I was above it...The emotions went from outrage to terror to bewilderment to guilt to sorrow and then back again to outrage. I felt a sickness inside me. Real disease.” (pg.41 & 46) This summer was the biggest change of his life, even bigger than actually being in the war, because it was a waiting game with himself to see what he would do. In this chapter of the book he talks about how he ran away to a river in the north with the thought of escaping to Canada. There, he met a man and stayed at his inn, and contemplates the future ahead of him. He couldn’t allow himself to run away and eventually returned home for fear of being shamed in the community if he didn’t go to war. The real change he fought against in this scenario was not whether or not to fight in war, but how the people of his community would view him. In his heart, he knew that he  should have stayed and dealt with how the people of his town would view him. It would have meant a better life for him. But in fighting that change he accepted his draft and went to Vietnam. O’Brien writes, “I was a coward. I went to the war.” On the Rainy River was of course just an exaggeration of his own story. When O’Brien was actually drafted he said, “I went to my room and started pounding on the typewriter...It was the most the most terrible summer of my life, worse than being in the war. My conscience kept telling me not to go, but my whole upbringing told me I had to.” (The Shock of Being Drafted) The change to be accepted was within his own community and family, but he refused to accept that change and so the action he took was to go to war.

One of the saddest stories in the book is the story of Norman Bowker. The action he took was finite and even if he wanted to, he couldn’t take it back. Norman Bowker lived in guilt after he left the war for not saving his friend Kiowa. O’Brien received a letter from Bowker before he killed himself, “...Norman Bowker, who three years later hanged himself in the locker room of a YMCA in his hometown in central Iowa...I received a long, disjointed letter in which Bowker described the problem of finding meaningful use for his life after the war...At one point he had enrolled in the junior college in his hometown, but the coursework, he said, seemed too abstract, too distant, with nothing real or tangible at stake, certainly not the stakes of a war.” (pg. 155) Norman found that adapting to the change of being in war was much easier than adapting to the change of being a civilian. He goes on in the letter to say that every job he worked felt meaningless. He felt isolated in his town by his experiences. He didn’t have anyone to talk to about his story because nobody really wanted to know. He could not move on from the war and even through trying to adapt he found the new change was too much for him. His refusal to adapt led to such a drastic and poor action.

Tim O’Brien talks a lot about his process for writing The Things They Carried. One of the biggest tools he uses is imagination. Imagining how his characters would react in certain situations and imagining what would happen if things were different is crucial to telling war stories. When asked in an interview about why he chooses to continually write war stories he answered, “After each of my books about the war has appeared, I thought it might be the last, but I've stopped saying that to myself. There are just too many stories left to tell -in fact, more all the time. I suppose that for the sake of my career, I ought to turn in another direction. And the novel I am working on now is about life in the north country of Minnesota. But I know more war stories will come out. They have to.” The way he has adapted to the change of going to war and then the additional change of going home is to write about it. He doesn’t limit himself because this is his way of getting all of his stories to the public. Just as Norman Bowker craved an audience to listen to what he’d been through, O’Brien has found his. Not everyone can use this method of adaptation. Imagination is helpful because it allows people to continue to live in their “new world” while still imagining the life they used to lead. In the case of O’Brien, he has adapted to being a civilian and is a functional and successful member of society. However, his imagination allows him to escape back into the world he was once used to.  

Adaptation to a rapidly changing world is necessary. Refusal to grow with a new world leads to decisions that are harmful. Some can be short term, and others even permanent. In the case of O’Brien he went to a war he didn’t belong in where he could’ve gotten killed. For Norman Bowker, the refusal to adapt meant ending his life.

Works Cited

Bruckner, D.J. "A Storyteller For the War That Won't End." New York Times Online. The New York Times. April 3, 1990. Web. October 20, 2009.

O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction. New York: Broadway, 1998. Print.

Sawyer, Scott. "In the Name of Love: An Interview With Tim O'Brien." Mars Hill Review. LeaderU.com (Links to an external site.). Winter/Spring 1996. Web. October 20 2009.

Narrative Essay

Analytical Essay:

Trauma can have serious effects on a person. People are place under high levels of stress, and this stress makes the experience difficult to handle. Often times if the stress is high enough, and can affect after the event had occurred, sometimes for long periods of time. And can change the person, and their perception. If a person is placed in a new environment the stress of trauma can make it difficult for them to readjust. After a traumatic experience, it can be difficult for a person to adjust to their world’s changing.

The novel, “The Yellow Birds” written by Kevin Powers, depicts a fictional character named John Bartle, who is  soldier fighting in the Iraq war. John experiences a lot of emotional trauma during the war, and has a difficult time readjusting to civilian life. When he returns to America, it is completely different for him. People in America have a different perception on the war than he has. At an airport bar, shortly after he returns to the U.S. Bartle is given a free drink by a Bartender.  

“ On me”. He smiled “It’s the least I can do.”

“Forget it. I want to pay.” I didn’t want to smile and say thanks. Didn’t want to pretend I’d done anything except survive.” (p.107)

The Bartender thinks that Bartel has done a great service to his country, but Bartle just feels guilty about it. This makes him feel alone in this new world, and shows how it is difficult for him to adjust to it.   

Fighting in a war is often very traumatic for soldiers. The stress of risking one's life, ending others, and witnessing death can weigh heavily on a person. The stress, anxiety and guilt are common emotions that soldiers experience under extreme circumstances. After returning from war, many soldiers experience a condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is evident in “The Yellow Birds” that Bartle is suffering from PTSD because he is emotionally damaged after returning from the war. This condition is a mental health issue in which the person feels the anxiety and stress of war long after combat when they aren’t in any real danger. The stress of a traumatic experience stays with the person long after it occurred. This changes them, and thus changes the world around them in their perspective.

Post-traumatic stress disorder occurs long after a traumatic event, or series of events has occurred. It harmfully affects the mental state of the person. In “ The Yellow Birds” Bartle had PTSD. He closes himself off from other people, and spends most his time isolated in his home. He wallows in his unhappiness, and does little physical activity. “ I had deteriorated more than one might expect in the short time I’d been home.” (p.131) Both his mental and his physical state are being harmed by PTSD. He is not adjusting well to his new world because it is difficult to do so.

Dealing with PTSD cans be difficult, and sometimes people with them can fall into depression. Bartle gets depressed in “The Yellow Birds”. He is depressed for a long time, and eventually it just becomes a way of life for him. He has adjusted to his new world, but in the wrong way. He has given up on trying to make things better, by accepting that they will be bad, and just living with it. “ There were times I’d been pleased with my ability to give up, to forget, to wait” (p.181) He is using this method to deal with his changing world.

The author of the Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers is an Iraq war veteran. “The Yellow Birds” is fictional novel about a fictional group of soldiers, and is not directly based on Powers’s war experience, the author did have knowledge of what it is like to fight in the Iraq war, which were incorporated into the book. Powers experienced many of the post war emotions that Bartle experience. Bartle’s inability to accept that he has a problem and give up was experienced by Powers as well. In an interview he stated “It's always easier, in the short term, to pretend like nothing's wrong.” But in the long term, this is an unhealthy way of dealing with PTSD. Kevin Powers’s war experience allowed him to accurately describe the post war emotions of soldiers in his novel.

The same world can be different to different people if it is seen with a fresh perspective. If something happened in that person’s life before returning to this old world, their view on life may be different. Trauma can sometimes cause this. In war, soldiers returning home often have to adjust to seeing their old world through a new perspective, effectively making it new world for them. Thus can be challenging to handle, as shown in Kevin Powers’s “ The Yellow birds”. The stress of trauma makes it more difficult to readjust to a changing world.

Works Cited for Analytical Essay:

Powers, Kevin. The Yellow Birds: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2012. Print.

Powers, Kevin. "KEVIN POWERS, IN AND OUT OF CONFLICT." Interview by Alice Whitwham. DKNY n.d.: n. pag. Print.

Narrative Essay:

After going through something stressful or nerve racking, a place where someone used to feel comfortable can make a person feel tense and on edge. This can happen after something bad happens there, and the person fears that it will happen again. This happened to me when I walking in the woods. When I was thirteen, I spent a lot of time walking in the woods alone. It was a place to escape from the world and relax. But one day, that relaxed atmosphere changed. I encountered a dangerous situation in the woods, which after the event had occurred had made me anxious. This turned my relaxing retreat into a danger zone. My traumatic event changing my world in the woods.

When I was thirteen, I spent a lot of time wandering the woods alone. I did it because I enjoyed the outdoors, and it was relaxing. I could let my mind wander, and escape the daily stresses of being a teenager. But on a cold snowy day in january, this relaxing place became dangerous. I encountered a pair of aggressive stray dogs, which although not very traumatising, left me a bit shaken, and nervous about returning to this place.

There was maybe three inches of snow on the ground on that cold winter day. Despite the relatively light snowfall, school had been canceled for the day. Since there wasn’t enough snow to sled in, I decided to spend my afternoon hiking in the woods. It may have been cold and miserable outside, but I wanted to take advantage of the emptiness and the amazing view of the snow on the forest floor and trees. This tranquil hike would actually prove to be stressful and nerve racking.

With my jacket and boots on, and a granola bar in my pocket, I set out for a particularly scenic trail, high up on a steep hillside overlooking the creek. The hike was relaxing until I saw that my path was blocked by two huskies, standing there looking at me. Huskies are actually one of my favorite dogs, they are normally loving and friendly. I expecting hem to start wagging their tails and come over to me but they just stood there and stared meaningfully. The larger one started to bark and growl. I knew that they were not going to be friendly. Now nervous, I anxiously waited for their owner to arrive, but they never did. I was alone in a snowy forest, with two large feral dogs, and they were angry.

I decided to turn around and walk away, to avoid confrontation. I dogs followed. I gradually quickened my pace, and then broke in run. This was a foolish mistake, the dogs began to run, and soon caught up with me. One barked loudly and barred it’s teeth, with no other options, I just yelled at it. It stepped back, but did not leave. The two dogs kept pursuing me for about a mile, catching up to me, trying to bite and then backing down. I remained unhurt, but they were waiting for their chance to sink their teeth into me.

Eventually I made it to a parking lot where a group of cross country skiers were hanging out. The dogs were nervous about this large number of people and watched us from behind the trees. Feeling safe at last, I quickly walked home. I didn’t want to go back to the woods for fear that the dogs would still be their. I was clearly encroaching on their territory, and I feared being met with the same retaliation if I did it again. I eventually did go back, but I was always looking over my shoulder, fearing that the dogs would find me. The calm, relaxing forest was no seemed dangerous. My mind didn’t wander as easily, because so much as the snap of a twig would make me anxious.

Eventually I adjusted to this new world. I did some research on dog attacks, and I started carrying branches and even a knife in my pocket with me on hikes for defense. Eventually when spring came, more pedestrians also began hiking in the woods again, so I assumed that the dogs good scared and left, or that someone reported them to animal control or something. My world was safe again, but not just because the problem was eliminated. I no longer feared any animal, because I knew that I could handle it. Learning to cope with the situation allowed me to adjust to world that had changed after a dangerous experience.

When the dangerous situation occurred, I realized that stray dog attacks were a legitimate danger of the local woods. Upon realizing this, something that I never even thought about became a fear of mine. This brought fear into this world of mine, and that changed it. I had difficulty adjusting to this fear. The only way to adjust to this new risk that had presented itself was to stop fearing it. I did this by preparing myself, and having confidence in the fact that I could overcome it. By not fearing the recurrence trauma, one can adjust to a new world that changed by it.

Analytical Essay:

The world is constantly changing anywhere from advancements in technology to changes in the environment. Humans are also always changing mentally and physically. When the men in “The Things They Carry” get drafted into war they are forced to face many changes in their lives. To cope with all of these changes many people shut them out and ignore them. Ignoring or not embracing change is one of the worst mistakes a person could make.

Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk didn’t start off as friends at all. However, based off of this story, when a person is at war they need to learn to trust people extremely fast. The two men made a pact that if either of them ever got critically injured in battle, than the other would kill him. They signed a document and had witnesses. When Lee got his leg blown off this pact went out the window. Lee said “But you’ve got to promise. Swear it to me--Swear you won't kill me. Jensen nodded his head and said “I swear,”...” Lee died shortly after that. In this scenario Jensen embraced change extremely quickly and went back on his written word. The two men changed their pact. Many people would have stuck with it because they wouldn’t want to change what they said. Jensen wouldn’t kill his friend because he didn’t want to have that burden.

Before Lieutenant Jimmy Cross went to war he met a woman named Martha. He quickly fell in love with Martha. Throughout the beginning of the book he could not stop thinking of her. This caused him to lead his men into a bad situation and someone got killed. “He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry in his stomach for the rest of the war.” Soon after that he came to a realization “... and because he realized that she did not love him and never would.” When Jimmy Cross went into the war he wasn’t ready to embrace the change of leaving Martha behind. Jimmy hung onto Martha like a little kid with a pacifier who just isn’t ready to give it up. Him going into battle with his mind full of thoughts about Martha got one of his men killed. He now needs to live with that. He got a man killed because he wasn’t ready to embrace change. By the time he finally realized the truth about Martha and his relationship, it was too late.

''I went to my room in the basement and started pounding the typewriter,'' he recalled. ''I did it all summer. It was the most terrible summer of my life, worse than being in the war. My conscience kept telling me not to go, but my whole upbringing told me I had to. That horrible summer made me a writer. I don't know what I wrote. I've still got it, reams of it, but I'm not willing to look at it. It was just stuff - bitter, bitter stuff, and it's probably full of self-pity. But that was the beginning.'' Tim O’Brien getting drafted into the war seemed like the worst thing possible to him. However, he embraced this change. By coming to the realization that he should just accept this life changing encounter instead of pushing it away. By accepting it, it made him the writer he is today. He vented his anger but acceptance of this change by writing and it made into an extremely successful author.

When people are faced with change they either choose to embrace it or ignore it. By ignoring change people put themselves into situations that aren’t always the best. It’s best to embrace change instead of completely ignoring it.

Narrative Essay:

It was finally December and that meant it was almost Christmas! Christmas time meant a million phone calls from every family member asking what I wanted. One call was special though. It was the phone call from my grandmom that always stuck out to me. We had a great relationship but many people would call it strange. For starters, I didn’t call her my grandmom. I called her my aunt. I did this because she always said she was to young to be a grandmom. She wanted me to call her Aunt Jan so that’s what I did. She was also a very open person. Anything that was on her mind she would say. That’s what I loved, but sometimes hated, about her. She had a saying “Lord keep one hand on my shoulder, and the other on my mouth.” So back to the phone call. It always started with a “how was your day?” I’d say “Good, what about you?” Then it would go on to “So Bella you know it’s that time of the year right.” We’d talk about how I’ve already talked to a billion people and told them all the same thing, I just want money. After finally telling her something different than money, we’d hang up. When Christmas came along I would go to her house in the morning, still wearing my pajamas. I would see all the things I asked for but every year there was always one extra thing. It was the same thing every year just a little different. It was a Victoria Secret sweat suit. The only difference between this years and last years was the color. She never got me the same color two years in a row. The last sweat suit I ever got from her was purple, one of her favorite colors.

A few months before the Christmas of 2012 we got some bad news. Aunt Jan got diagnosed with breast cancer. It was a really hard thing for all of us to wrap our heads around because none of us saw it coming. My grandmom fought hard and beat cancer once. When Christmas of 2012 came nothing changed. We had our same phone call. I still went there in the morning, just our usual Christmas.

After Christmas her cancer came back, and it came back stronger than before. Unfortunately, on one sad day in May of 2013, my grandmom lost her battle to breast cancer. Cancer had gotten the best of her and none of us could believe it. We all knew that she wasn't going to make it because that's what the doctors told us but we still had hope that she would beat it again. None of us were ready to accept the fact that she would be gone, especially me.

I saw her the night before she died. I looked at her and she looked back at me with a very particular look. A look that said the words I never wanted to hear, without even saying them. A look that was certain that her time here was over. It hurt to bad to agree with her.

After her death I wasn't ready to accept all the changes that were about to happen. I started to let my life fall apart. In my eyes the only way to really deal with my problems was to drink. Where I live teen drinking is a pretty normal thing. Almost everyone teenager drinks to have fun. That's not why I started though. Sure it might of seemed like I was having fun in the moment, but when I got home and it was just me it wasn't fun anymore. I called her phone almost every night and listened to her voicemail over and over again. I left long messages of the things I never got to say. I hoped that one day maybe, just maybe, she would answer.

I knew that it was time to finally accept that she was gone. The final realization was when Christmas of 2014 came along. I didn't get that phone call I usually got. When I went there in the morning, there wasn't a sweatsuit waiting for me to change into. The house felt empty and not whole. All the things that we did together, I would now have to do by myself.

When I finally accepted this change I realized that everything was going to be okay. I knew that she wouldn't want me to let my life fall apart just because she isn't here anymore. I knew that if she were here she would ask me what the hell I was doing with myself. Whenever I felt down I would just ask myself how she would react if she were still here. By accepting the fact that just because she's gone physically, doesn't mean she's gone spiritually. I know that she's always there watching over me and I'm now able to accept that and be a better person because of it.

Works Cited for Analytical Essay:

Bruckner, D.J. "A Storyteller For the War That Won't End." New York Times Online. The New York Times. April 3, 1990. Web. October 20, 2009.

O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway, 1998. Print.

Analytical Essay:

Friendship is a mutual bond between two or more people, a stronger form of an interpersonal bond than an association (Wikipedia). Such a dry definition does not give the concept of friendship justice. Friendship is putting someone else first, and it is not a large theme in The Yellow Birds. The relationship between the two main characters, Bartle and Murph is not one of close friendship. It is difficult to define their relationship. The main reason that Bartle concerns himself with Murph at all is because of a promise that he made to Murph’s mother, he promised her he would look out for her son, and bring him home from the war. Despite the fact that they were almost complete strangers. Still, he felt obligated to keep his promise, regardless of the fact that he despises keeping it. Bartle spends a fair amount of time thinking about how much he doesn’t want to be responsible for Murph. After Murph dies, Bartle looks back on the moments that he didn’t comfort Murph, or ignored his behavior, and wonders that if he had comforted and consoled him, could there have been a chance that he could’ve saved him? Reliving each moment and thinking of different scenarios is what caused Bartle to become so depressed after he was discharged, but the root of it was that he did not keep his promise.  

Although it feels like a memoir when reading it, all of the characters are fictional and the story is fictional. Author Kevin Powers enlisted in the army when he was seventeen years old, he fought in Iraq as a machine gunner assigned to an engineer unit. "I think I had to come to terms with my own experience before I was able to contend with it in writing," Powers said in an interview with The Guardian. The Yellow Birds is Powers’s answer to the wider question of "what it was like over there.” He set out, he says, with the aim of "seeing if it would be possible to paint a portrait of the war looking out from inside of this one soldier" (The Guardian) The focus of the book, very personal, going back and forth between the war, and Bartle’s life after in Virginia, he switches, sometimes mid-sentence, between the two places.

“The root of his guilt is that he wanted to be good, and he tried to be good, but he failed. His conflict is between his desire to redeem that failure and his acceptance of complete powerlessness.” (Kevin Powers) This is about where all of  Bartle’s guilt really comes from, he does feel guilt from Murph’s death, and from his survival, but the root of it all is the fact that Barle never actually kept his promise to watch out for Murph, and bring him home.

Analytical Essay:

Human’s have a variety of coping mechanisms that allow them to continue living after something life changing has happened. It’s human nature to survive, so therefore, humans must find ways to keep living when life becomes difficult to handle. In order to deal with tragedy, loss, or difficult times, humans detach themselves from the situation at hand in order to cope. Different personality types detach themselves differently but overall, people dehumanize suffering in order to get through it.

In  Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the men have rituals that they carry out when they come across a dead Vietnamese soldier. The men do things like shake hands with the dead, toast the dead, and speak to the dead as if they were as alive as they. In this specific example, O’Brien’s talking about the way the men toast to a dead man they found. “It was more than mockery. There was a formality to it, like a funeral without sadness.” Most of the men aren’t rude about death. However, by removing the sadness from the atmosphere of death, they’re not associating their own emotions with the situation. Removing sadness from the equation removes the sense of attachment to the circumstances. By acting as if death is a game, the men not only separate themselves from the grief, but separate themselves from the guilt of taking another man’s life.   

O’Brien, in one of his interviews, says, “The one way to psychologically endure it all is to escape in your head.” O’Brien’s speaking about retreating into his imagination to mentally survive a hardship such as war. That was his specific way of detaching. It was also a way he expressed through the actions of many of the soldiers in his story. O’Brien writes a character named Kiowa, a native american young man who hasn’t let the war change his outlook on life. By staying true to his pre-war self, Kiowa lives in an illusion. He’s escaping into his mind, into what he was before he was surrounded by death and destruction in Vietnam. By refusing to change who he is, Kiowa is building a mental wall that keeps the war from destroying him psychologically.

In The Things They Carried, there is a chapter titled, The Man I Killed. The entire chapter is describing a man O’Brien shot and the backstory he imagined for the man.  O’Brien, when describing what the man looked like after he shot him, says “...and his other eye was a star-shaped hole.” This phrase, “star shaped hole” is used throughout the not only the rest of the chapter but the rest of the book. The repetition gives a sense of importance to the phrase. By saying it often, O’Brien is showing how difficult it is to separate your life from a death you caused

Later on, in the last chapter of The Things They Carried, O’Brien describes his first experience with death. His childhood love, a girl named Linda, died of cancer when she was nine. O’Brien refuses to accept she’s dead so he begins to see her in his imagination, so that she’ll never really be gone. “And at night time, I’d slide into bed knowing that Linda would be there waiting for me.” This is a direct example of coping with death through denial and detachment. The young O’Brien imagines his childhood love as alive even though she is very much dead because he can’t cope with reality. These coping mechanisms of separating oneself from reality don’t only apply to dire circumstances such as war. These coping strategies are used for everyday tragedies, such as the death of Linda.

These psychological coping mechanisms aren’t only relevant to soldiers, veterans or enlistees. These detachment methods are used, sometimes unknowingly, in everyday tragedies like death of a family member or loss of a job. Even children will employ these methods when faced with school bullies, ostracization or, more serious, parental abuse. Everyone will handle their grief differently but in general, humans will detach themselves and dehumanize their suffering in order to get through it.

Works Cited for Analytical Essay:

O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Print.

"In the Name of Love." In the Name of Love. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Jan. 2015.

Narrative Essay:

I attended Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry for 10 years. I know, it’s a little longer than most students spend at Hogwarts but I was a special case. Due to having to live a double life, as a wizard and a muggle. I started off at Hogwarts a lot younger than most, around the age of 4. Ironically enough, it was the same year my mom enrolled me in Pre-K at Epiphany of Our Lord Catholic Grade School, but between you and me that was more of a side gig. My real focus was on spells and magic, I never cared much for storytime or coloring books. I did a good job of keeping my magic life separate from my muggle life. I hid my Hogwarts school books with Cloaking Charms, I practiced my Hovering Charms while simultaneously doing my muggle homework with a levitating pencil. No one expected a thing.

For years, I studied the wizarding basics. How to brew a basic potion and how to transfigure a matchstick into a needle. Sometimes, Catholic school would interfere with my studies. Like in 3rd grade, when the teacher told me I was too young to be reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, a required reading at Hogwarts. I explained to her that I must read it, as Professor Binns had assigned it as homework, due the following week. I suppose she didn’t appreciate that I was putting my magical studies before her class and she forbade me from reading it again. I began having to do my Hogwarts homework in secret at home, instead of in Catholic school where I usually did it.

What these Catholic School folks didn’t understand is, I put their school secondary to Hogwarts. I only went to Epiphany because those gosh darn muggles required all children to attend their schools. I didn’t see why I needed math to solve problems when I could brew a perfectly good potion or cast a spell instead.

As I continued through my education, I continued juggling my muggle work and my wizarding work rather successfully. Around 5th grade, however, things became more complicated. I loved Hogwarts, not only because the coursework was so exciting, but because everyone was my friend there. Whether someone was Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw, or Hufflepuff, I was friends with them. In the muggle world, though, things were a little different. In 5th grade, all the other kids started having big birthday parties or weekend get togethers. I was rarely invited. I was so busy at Hogwarts though, I probably wouldn’t have found the time anyway. People started whispering about me being friendless. Obviously, I wasn’t, I had so many friends at Hogwarts, more than I could count! But... I couldn’t tell the muggles about that. It’s all part of the Wizarding Decree of Secrecy.

In time, I began to learn more complicated magic. I was succeeding in Hogwarts in ways unimaginable. I received 8 O.W.Ls, Ordinary Wizarding Levels, a type of wizarding certification that allowed me to further my education in my chosen fields of magic. I was Captain of the Gryffindor Quidditch team and was leading my team toward the Quidditch Cup for the third year in a row. Things were really working out for me in Hogwarts.

In the muggle world, however, I faced more challenges. Teachers were getting aggravated with me, claiming I wasn’t paying enough attention in their classes. If I could only have explained the situation to them but I had learned my lesson in 3rd grade. If only I could have mastered that Replicating Charm, I could have been in two places at once! Alas, it seemed I was doomed to this double life.

Around my 9th year at Hogwarts and my 7th year at muggle school, everything became so hectic that my two lives began to merge. How I longed for simpler days of Wingardium Leviosa and times tables! I started getting confused. I couldn’t tell the difference between my American History textbook and my copy of A History of Magic. I was lagging behind at Hogwarts and my title of Captain of the Gryffindor Quidditch team was revoked. I started to loose my friends, I started to forget what they even looked like. My memories were fleeting and far and few between. I forgot my schedule, my spells, charms, hexes, potion recipes, and even the hallways of Hogwarts.

I had no trouble recalling my math homework or when the next Religion test was. I knew the names of everyone in my class and how to navigate the halls. I no longer swished and flicked my pencils, practicing the motions for spellcasting, because I no longer remembered how to cast a spell. I was becoming a muggle.

I left Catholic School the same day I should have graduated Hogwarts. It’s funny how things change. I graduated from the muggle school the way I meant to have graduated Hogwarts; top marks and a future lying ahead of me. I left Hogwarts though, a few months prior. No self respecting witch forgets how to perform basic spells, as I had. After ten great years, I lost my imagination. I lost my Hogwarts and I lost my magic. I had to face reality.

Analytical Essay:

Depression and anxiety are common emotions experienced by people when their world changes in a non favorable way. People develop different habits in order to cope with what they are experiencing. Sleeping is one way to cope with it. It is very common due to the fact that people attempt to have happy dreams of what their life used to be before their world changed. It provides people with a pass time to get over with their change. In the book, The Things They Carried, by Tim O'brien, people cope with the changing world by attempting to dream because then they avoid having to consciously think about their troubles and can make their own fantasy.

In the chapter “Lives of the Dead”, Tim O’brien talks about how he coped with the death of his friend Linda who died of brain cancer. After her death he slept a lot more often. This is when his mom started a conversation with him to see if he was alright. He responded, “‘Nothing. I just need sleep, that's all.’ I didn't dare tell the truth. It was embarrassing, I suppose, but it was also a precious secret, like a magic trick, where if I tried to explain it, or even talk about it, the thrill and mystery would be gone. I didn't want to lose Linda.” (244) This shows that events that cause depression are sometimes dealt with by dreaming and therefore sleeping in order to make a place where the real world changes that caused the depression is no longer there. He really believes it is a successful way of coping with it, even though he doesn’t understand how something so simple can be so joyful. The reason for dreaming as opposed to eating or some other way of coping is because while eating takes you away from what happened, it does not take you back to when that change happened, whereas dreaming does. Also, there are less adverse side effects to sleeping than to excessive eating such as weight gain and risk for heart disease and several others diseases that are life threatening which are common side effects of excessive eating.

In the chapter “On the Rainy River”, O’brien was staying at a lodge owned by Elroy Berdahl in Minnesota near the border between the United States and Canada. O’brien had sleeping problems because of his anxiety of being drafted into the Vietnam War. He was tempted into going to Canada to escape his draft order but was too scared to. “I couldn't sleep; I couldn't lie still. At night I'd toss around in bed, half awake, half dreaming, imagining how I'd sneak down to the beach and quietly push one of the old man's boats out into the river and start paddling my way toward Canada.” (50) Here is an example of a time when a character desperately tried to sleep in order to avoid their real world change. While he was not fully asleep, he even mentions the fact that when he was “half awake, half dreaming” he dreamed about doing what he was too afraid to do in real life which was going into Canada. This show that even when one cannot successfully sleep, if they are in a half dream state, they can at least experience part of what they would if they were fully asleep.

In the chapter “Enemies”, soldiers Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk got into a fight. Jensen being larger in size, was victorious and ended up breaking Strunk’s nose. After that event Strunk was always on edge at night while trying to sleep. “At night he had trouble sleeping—a skittish feeling—always on guard, hearing strange noises in the dark, imagining a grenade rolling into his foxhole or the tickle of a knife against his ear.” (63)  While he was never able to successfully go to sleep, this does show what happens when you are awake and worry about the changing world. In this case while he was awake he stressed out always thinking Jensen was waiting to kill him. His attempt at sleeping in order to dream would have proved as a good way of coping if we was able to. It is certain that him being awake made him not able to think about anything other than the possibility of Jensen killing him.

During an interview with Mars Hill Review (MHR), Tim O’brien was asked why  he thought imagining was crucial to him as a soldier and a person. He responded, “Imagination is important in a couple of ways. One way is as a psychological means of escape. If you can lose yourself in a fantasy, then you're no longer trapped in the horror of, say, Vietnam.” Dreaming is when one’s imagination is at its fullest so it would make sense that most of that imagination came from dreaming. In your dreams its much easy to escape reality because its when things seem most real but actually aren’t.

While there are many different ways to cope with the changing world dreaming is one of the most easy and common that provides escape. It gives people the ability to experience the most realistic feeling of places that isn’t real yet can mimic a person’s desire for things to be how they were before the world changed. While people cannot always controls what happens in their dreams, just the hope of them being able to experience their better past life is something for them to look forward to. Without dreaming, many people wouldn’t have something to look forward to in order for them to be in a happy place.

Works Cited for Analytical Essay:

O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction. New York: Broadway, 1998. Print.

Sawyer, Scott. "In the Name of Love: An Interview With Tim O'Brien." Mars Hill Review. LeaderU.com (Links to an external site.). Winter/Spring 1996. Web. October 20 2009.

Narrative Essay:

“Nebil are you okay?” my mom would usually ask.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just tired” was my response.

Under the covers of my bed, I was in a place of comfort. I preferred to sleep facing my window, so I wouldn’t be looking at anyone who came in my room. I either stared at something in the room or out of the window before I slept. Sometimes I slept from twelve noon until 8 at night and often times much more erratic sleeping patterns.

Sleeping was my way of coping with something that happened to me, whether it be that I was a mad at my parents or friends or whether I was depressed about something. This time I slept because I was depressed about my grades in class. I used to always be stressed about my grades and thinking they had a big snowball effect on my future. I used to think that if I got a B in Math for even just one quarter my chances of getting into an Ivy League instantly dropped to nothing. Pressure from academics like that always used to get to me. I used to see a lot of my friends getting much better grades than I was, and they were worried about their own future which made me think I should be even more worried about my own. The stress from worrying about my future and classes often times required for me to sleep.

The reason I slept was because when I slept, I didn’t think about anything. I was free from the worries that encompassed me while I was awake. In my dreams I did what I normally did while not thinking about what I would have to when I woke. I guess I like that feeling of being care free or unaware. It relieves me of stress and allows me to enjoy myself. After waking up I am usually much more alive than I was before I slept. I still would keep that feeling of being carefree for a while after I woke up. That is until my friends say something about homework, projects, colleges, and SATs.

Aside from my parents, my friends started to worry about me too. At first on school nights I would usually chat with them on skype. When I went to sleep early because I was angry, stressed, or depressed, they often ask me what’s wrong. “Hey Nebil, what’s wrong?” someone usually says in school when they see my head down.

“Nothing, I’m just not feeling great. I just need some sleep.” was my usual response.

“Okay, hope you feel better?” they could tell I was lying, but it’s not like I would put much effort into it anyway.

My sleeping habits started to become unhealthy. I used to sleep in school very often. In my sophomore year, in almost every History class for the first quarter, I slept through just because I couldn’t stand some of the ignorant comments that were said from across the classroom. It was so bad that it got to the point where the teacher took me out of class and asked why I was sleeping so much. My response was the same to him as well.

My sleeping habits only got worse. I started to sleep in on weekends. Whenever my friends asked me if I  wanted to go with them some where, I would come up with some excuse and tell them that yesterday was rough I wasn’t feeling good. I got too used to dreaming as a way of escape. While initially it seemed harmless, I later realized I was desocializing myself from the world. The few times I didn’t make an excuse and went with them somewhere, I would hear them converse about funny events that I missed because I didn’t go with them the previous time. At first I made nothing of it, but later I realized I asked the question, “What are you guys talking about?” a little too often because I didn’t meet with them as often as I previously did.

I tried to stop myself from sleeping by doing something else to cope with my stress. Eating didn’t work at all because I didn’t like to eat while I was angry, stressed or depressed. While I liked exercising, I was never in the mood to do it for the same reasons I didn’t eat. In the end I just went back to sleeping and pushed the thoughts of my friends, parents, and teachers worrying about me to the back of my head.

One of my friends who I talked to often always told me not to worry about school because I was doing just fine in school. They told me that I was getting all A’s so there was really nothing to worry about. While it was nice that they did that, it was hard to take them seriously because they were doing much better than me in school and much more outside of school to have things to put on their resumé.

Since then, that friend has kept on telling me that I’m at an okay place. Ever since then, I started believing what they said more and more as believed their sincerity. To this day I still do sleep when I’m depressed but I noticed that I sleep less. It’s not because I found a different way to cope with stress, depression, and anger, but now I don’t experience those emotions as often because my friends helped take those emotions off of me. I found out that my friends have become a more important tool for me to deal with an uncomfortably changing world.

Analytical:

Many things can change within a given amount of time, throughout life there are many situations where you have to adapt to get through to the next task, to the next day. The individual has to change themselves in a positive or negative way to be able to get through the pressing situation in their lives,and the changing world evolves based on past mistakes. The changing world and “the self” are related through a mutual bond of pain and adaptation.  Generally the bond of pain has to do with loss or negative issues within the world, and the adaptation is how the world and individual change within themselves.

Throughout the book, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, the characters change based on the unfortunate things that happen to them. One of the best examples of this is at the beginning of the book, while O’Brien is still introducing the characters, saying their names and what they carry. In this moment the author is talking about a soldier named Jimmy Cross and how he deals with having to be in the war while the love of his life is elsewhere. “They were called legs or grunts. To carry something was to hump it, as when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps.” (Pg 3)

The soldiers have to learn to adapt to the new weight of their equipment, which obviously puts new weight on their backs plus the strain of being in a new place. This causes them physical pain (at least a little). And they have to learn to deal with the pain/strain and move on. They must trudge on through the new environment they are in and adapt to everything they go through to stay alive so they can get home. The changing world is were they actually are (in the field aka Vietnam), and the self is exactly that (inside all their heads/how they feel). This is really personified throughout this quote, even though it is pretty short, just by Jimmy deciding to focus more on ‘humping’ his weight and the job he has to do rather than Matha at home. He’s adapting to his situation by blocking out the part of his life that is causing the biggest problem; Martha is making his service difficult, so he decided to block her out and think more about what he has to do, rather than what he misses. And the over all changing world just goes on through the war it is already in, which is the personification of pain for the world. The fact that its getting destroyed over territory and politics etc.

Tim's explanations of what the men have to deal with show more examples of how the men adapt He makes their characters seem more human so can connect with them and sort of feel their pain.(Pg 21) “They were tough. They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing- these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had terrible weight.”Again the soldiers have to deal with all the different issues/situations they go through in the war, and everything that also doesn’t happen. Like all the men that don’t survive, all the people they can’t see everyday, all the battles they don’t win etc. They also have to deal with everything bad that may or may not have happened to them before they even went into the service. The changing world in this situation is again where they are, but more specifically being in the military (U.S Army). The self is also within the subject, more exactly, were the individual is in their mind. Mostly involving their acceptance of past events (Emotional stability). Just generally meaning that the world changes its scenery and location, while the individual changes as a person to adapt to changes around them.

While in the war a soldier named Rat Kiley writes a letter to the sister of his best friend, who was just killed in battle. He does this because they were so close during their service and he thought it would be better than her just getting the Killed In Action notice. After he sends the letter out she never writes back, and this is Rat’s reaction to her lack of a response, “Listen to Rat Kiley. Cooze, he says. He does not say bitch. He certainly does not say woman, or girl. He says cooze. Then he spits and stares. He’s nineteen years old- it’s too much for him- so he looks at you with those big sad gentle killer eyes and says cooze, because his friend is dead, and because it’s incredibly sad and true: she never wrote back.”(Pg 69)

This proves the point that the changing world and “the self” are related through a mutual bond of pain and adaptation. It illustrates that the ‘characters’ or soldiers in the real world will adapt each other’s stories for one another and tell them as their own. Effectively this makes their coping go over easier. Although they still feel the need to tell the stories, which is a way of expressing the emotions they felt in order to adapt. In most situations the emotions they’re expressing, his pain from past war experiences.

Even throughout different interviews with the author of “The Things They Carried” Tim O’Brien alludes to the issues he and his fellow soldiers had during the war that he touches on in the books, even though most of the characters in the book are fictional they are based off real people he met.

''We all wondered why the place was so hostile. We did not know there had been a massacre there a year earlier. The news about that only came out later, while we were there, and then we knew. There is a monument in My Lai now and I want to see it.''

This is probably the most obvious and literal quote that could be found. The changing world having to go through a massacre, a large loss of life in a certain area, then having that area be physically changed into a memorial for those who lost their lives during that tragedy. The individual being the people that were affected, the killed, their families, the community members. Then those individuals somehow having to adapt in order to cope with all the changes caused by the massacre itself.

During this same interview with New York Times, O’Brien was speaking to the interviewer about how he felt getting drafted, the shock he felt and what he did after receiving the notice himself.

“His reaction to the draft notice still surprises him. ''I went to my room in the basement and started pounding the typewriter,'' he recalled. ''I did it all summer. It was the most terrible summer of my life, worse than being in the war. My conscience kept telling me not to go, but my whole upbringing told me I had to. That horrible summer made me a writer. I don't know what I wrote. I've still got it, reams of it, but I'm not willing to look at it. It was just stuff - bitter, bitter stuff, and it's probably full of self-pity. But that was the beginning.''”

Tim openly admits to how he felt as his life changed around him. The war becoming worse to the point where the military needed more bodies to the point where more men were drafted into service. He changed in himself, based on the fear and shock he felt at having to go into a situation that could possibly lead to his death.

O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction. New York: Broadway, 1998. Print.

Bruckner, D.J. "A Storyteller For the War That Won't End." New York Times Online. The New York Times. April 3, 1990. Web. October 20, 2009.

Narrative:

Most of my family is involved with the Military, and even those who aren’t work for the government. My father was in the Army, My uncle was in the Marine Core, My aunt in the Navy, and my mother, grandmother, great-aunt, and uncle, all work for the IRS. Reading Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” was very helpful in putting everything they had to go through into perspective.

More so my uncle Ray honestly. He came home about four years ago, but he was flown overseas and served in Iraq. Dropped into an unfamiliar place, fresh outta high school and dead set on bringing the family honor. Although thats not really what happened. He doesn’t suffer from PTSD or any other of the myriad of psychological issues he very well could from being in the war.

Although if you go through his phone you’ll see pictures of what its like, and he has buried many friends while he was in the war. Which is touched on very often throughout the book and also in interviews with the author himself. “The Things They Carried”, shows how the soldiers felt doing what they were ordered, and how they reacted to all the death and destruction around them.

That was always something I wanted to better understand, because I knew that my uncle had seen dead bodies, and buildings crumble. Seeing those things can completely change a person and their point of view on life, so I wondered how that affected Ray. I could never actually ask him though, because even if it tore him apart inside he would put on a brave face and act like it didn't phase him in the slightest.

Tim opened my eyes to the fact, that sometimes people in the service just can’t talk about those things, that I can’t just expect anyone to pour out everything they ever saw in the field to me. That sometimes its better not to ask, and just let your imagination assume the worst, and try to be as kind as you can. Just show them all the love you have, so they don’t forget its there when they need it. Just always be happy when they make it home, and try to be the best family you can when they do. Give them support. Everything you can, but not too much so you don’t overwhelm them into thinking there is something wrong with them. Just in general, take everything in stride and don’t think about it too hard, just love the person that comes back as much as you loved them before they were deployed.

Analytical Essay:

The world is constantly changing.  When people are young they don’t catch on to the change as easily.  Once those people get older they start to question whether they’ve changed as well or is the world just changing drastically around you.  Though many people believe that either the world changes a person or they change the world, the truth is that both happen simultaneously, with each being affected by the other's changes.

War is something that has been on and off between countries for many many years.  “The Yellow Birds” by Kevin Powers is a fictional story about the Iraq war.  Powers was a soldier who fought in the war so he used his first hand experience to make the story as realistic as possible.  "I was not surprised by the cruelty of my ambivalence back then. Nothing seemed more natural than someone getting killed."  This is a quote from “The Yellow Birds.”  The character saying the quote proves that the world is starting to change him and how it has changed him since then.  During the war he got used to death because it happened so frequently.  Since he’s talking about how he thought of death during that time in the past tense it is assumed he no longer is so numb to death.  The world may have changed his outlook on death atleast twice in his lifetime.  

The Yellow Birds really shows how numb the war makes soldiers.  the way almost every character talks about war makes it seem so common.  “People are going to die,' he said flatly. 'It's statistics.' Then he got up and left the room."  This quote proves that not only does this particular soldier look at death as a common thing, but also shows that life itself loses its quality and is not as valuable.  He views people’s lives as statistics or numbers.  Soldiers thought that if they’re numb to loss then they’ll survive the war, but they didn’t survive the war at all spiritually.  They turned numb to loss and almost lost the emotion of sadness.  Losing any emotion is like partially losing a quality of life, or losing something that proves a person is a healthy, living human being.

The last quote from “The Yellow Birds” isn’t like the other quotes.  The other two quotes do not occur when a death happens, but this quote does.  "I'll yell, I thought. I'll tell him they are old, let them pass... I said nothing.  Holy sh**, that bit** got murdered... there was no grief, or anguish, or joy, or pity in that statement. There was no judgement made. He was just surprised."  This quote proves that this particular soldier doesn’t grief the death of the woman at all.  He only feels surprised that she died, and will most likely get over it by the next day.  The world around him has changed soldiers outlook on death and life in general.  

In an interview, the author of “The Yellow Birds” Kevin Powers said “ I wonder why people are the way they are. I wonder how do we justify the things that we do, because it always seems like we are doing terrible things. But the stories that we tell ourselves are always about our goodness and our idealism and that contradiction has been interesting to me throughout my whole life.” This is an example of how people change the world or how it’s looked at by other people.  If all people hear about is good things in the news or any source, then they’ll believe the world is a good place and change its reputation everyone has of it.  When all the news talks about is negative things going on in the world it changes people’s outlook on it in a negative way.  Some may be concerned with the world when it’s in this state and some may just lose hope in the people around them.

There’s lots of different ways the world changes people physically, mentally, and emotionally.  People can only change the world physically and how other people look at it.  “The Yellow Birds” depicts a very negative and sad world where the soldiers are fighting emotionlessly and are not phased by anything going on around them. In a world like that the people will not continue to prosper and do great things like they have continued to do for centuries.

Works Cited for Analytical Essay:

Analytical Essay:

In the Yellow Bird’s, war changes the lives of many soldiers. PTSD is an outcome of the war. While the world remains ignorant to the war’s side effects, the soldiers continue to experience a change that will change their lives forever. There should be sympathy and understanding in the heart of every American when there’s a discussion of people at war.

“I was not surprised by the cruelty of my ambivalence back then. Nothing seemed more natural than someone getting killed... I had to see the world with clear eyes, to focus on the essential. We only pay attention to the rare things, and death was not rare.” p.11 People at war are stripped of morals and codes that they were taught at a young age. When in war, what’s wrong becomes right and what’s right becomes wrong. Killing is wrong, any type of violence is. Love is taught to be given to everyone, including your enemies because it’s the right thing to do. People at war are not allowed to have a heart or to show emotions because when they do, they show weakness, they’re supposed to be ruthless and be able to kill when demanded. For some, holding a gun is scary enough, but asking them to pull the trigger is another story. When Americans look at people who have been in war, compassion should be racing through their hearts because the soldiers did it so no one else had to. If soldiers were given sympathy, that would show that there is understanding. Having someone understand what you’ve been through can go a long way.

“As human beings, we have the blessing and the curse that we’re able to adapt to almost anything. No matter how extreme the circumstances you’re in, they become normal.” Because humans adapt, they don't understand. At one point, after readapting and readapting, humans stop. Some soldiers become adapted to the war lifestyle, so when they come home they can no longer readapt. As people try to understand people in war, they often figure out that war is something that needs to be experienced to understand. Once given the opportunity to walk a mile in their shoes, then there will be an understanding.

“I realized, as I stood there in the church, that there was a sharp distinction between what was remembered, what was told , and what was true. And I didn’t think I’d ever figure out which was which.” PTSD gives soldiers a fight or flight instinct caused by fear that’s stuck in their heads from war. This feeling that they have comes, even when they may not be in danger which may make them seem crazy. It comes with experience from physical harm.

“I wonder why people are the way they are. I wonder how do we justify the things that we do, because it always seems like we are doing terrible things. But the stories that we tell ourselves are always about our goodness and our idealism and that contradiction has been interesting to me throughout my whole life.” Humans try to come up with an explanation for everything. They’re always trying to fix something. Some things in life just can't be fixed. Life does not owe anyone an explanation, somethings you can only wonder why they happen.

There should be sympathy and understanding in the heart of every American when there’s a discussion of people at war. They do they job no one else wants to do. To label them as crazy is wrong, they should only be labeled heroic.

Narrative Essay:

From a small child, I was always told to reach for the stars.  “You can do anything you want in life, you just have to want it and work for it.” I remember being asked what I wanted to be when I was 9. At nine years old, you don’t the variety of jobs that are offered in the world. “I wanna work at McDonalds, it’s my favorite fast food restaurant.”

The conversation stopped. “You wanna struggle your whole life?

“You won’t even be able to support your family?”

Questions were being thrown at me. I’m just a kid, I don’t understand what I’m saying and why I’m saying. I honestly thought people at McDonalds were very kind people. Who else wants to stand at a window and wait on people. Jobs like this should be appreciated, not shunned upon.

I remember when my brother said he wanted to be a cop. My mom wanted to know why none of us wanted to be a doctor. She said McDonalds workers aren’t paid enough and being a cop is a dangerous job. All of a sudden, that statement about being whatever we want turns out to be false.

You can be anything that isn’t a danger and pays well. Society has conjured up what is an acceptable job and what isn’t. Everyone plays a part in the way the world is now, but before you can play a part, you have to find a part. In The Yellow Birds, the main character found his part in becoming a soldier.

Bartle forgot the importance if his role. He began to build a friendship with Murphy. He promised his mother that he would bring Murphy back safe and sound. The thing about promises is that you can’t make one unless it’s something you can control, you can't control death and who it strikes. That’s what the world revolves around; control. Some are born with control, some are born without it. People can’t control what they’re born into but they can control what they do with it and whether they want to work a McDonald’s job or be a doctor, it’s their decision. They should be appreciated regardless.

Analytical Essay:

      In the words of Chinese Philosopher, Lao Tzu “Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow.”  Life has a multitude of change, which most of the time is almost unavoidable. Something leads to change, then the person affected by the change  is left to process what happened. It is not the easiest thing to do, especially if the change is formidable. The fact of the matter is, Bartle is almost forced into a changing world. Things happen that aren’t always ideal, and the more one thinks about it, man is merely a small piece in an even bigger picture, and no matter how hard one tries, the reaction is never going to be a good one.

Things happen all the time. It’s a fact of life people have come to accept. It’s not always good, but it isn’t always terrible. Kevin Powers explores this in his book, The Yellow Birds, a story set through the duration of the Iraq war. “And you can’t explain it, but, it’s just, like, fuck you, but then you signed up to go so it’s all your fault, really, because you went on purpose so you are in the end, doubly fucked, so why not find a spot and curl up and die and let’s make it as painless as possible because you really are a coward.” Some of the worst things that can happen to someone is dealt by the person themselves. Often times dealing with a sudden change  is carried out with the best intentions in mind, however, as quickly as the world can change, so can everything in it, and the ultimate reaction to all this can be pretty shocking. The world isn’t a nice place, especially if one gets too caught up in all the small things.

Reacting to change can almost be fitted into stages. Someone can either react with some deal of emotion, or with none at all. In this circumstance, its more or less a personal struggle, rather than something against whatever change is occurring. “The closer I got to reconstructing him in my mind, the more the picture I was trying to recreate receded.” This quote, taken from Bartle, describes his process of attempting to recollect his memories after coming home from the war. When things slowly begin breaking down, and Bartle begins attempting to process what  happened, everything else begins distancing from whoever him . This is dangerous in an ever changing world, because when someone finds themselves so caught up in previous events and ideas, they’re almost slipping away from what's actually going on, ignoring whatever change may be happening.

Sometimes after situations such as this, one becomes desensitized with the rest of the world. Forgetting everything else in favor their own feelings. “At one time you could of asked me if I thought the snow meant something. I would’ve said yes. I might have thought there was some significance to the fact that there had been snow on the day that Murph had come into my life and snow on the day I willed myself into the one that had been taken from him.” Once things begin changing, it almost seems like nothing else begins to matter.Bartle’s world changes after the death of his best friend. Small things, things that he never really paid much attention to slowly became a trigger to him. Things he barely looked at became something of detachment.

Kevin Powers associates most of his writing toward generating a genuine recollection of what happens during wartime. That being said, the relationship between both past experiences in real life, and through the war, are almost parallel toward the idea of change. I've always had a certain level of comfort with the dark part of the human experience. It hasn't had an attraction, but it has certainly had a fascination.”

Change often brings a variety of difference into a situation, and these experiences aren’t always so bright. The dark part of human experiences that the author is talking about relates back to how one can react to the change in the rest of the world.

Works Cited for Analytical Essay:

Powers, Kevin. The Yellow Birds: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2012. Print.

Lewis, Tim. "Fiction: Meet The Author." TheGuardian.com. The Guardian, 23 June 2013. Web. 11 Jan. 2015. <www.theguardian.com%2Fbooks%2F2013%2Fjun%2F23%2Fkevin-powers-interview-yellow-birds>

Narrative

In my opinion the real world is terrible, and I’d rather not deal with it at all.   Considering the fact that I’m always one incident away from full blown insanity, I try to change whenever I feel necessary, rather than changing with the rest of the world. Life is too short to try and keep up with small things. You’re either moving whenever things feel right, or you’re caught up in something you’ll end up forgetting later.

And that’s how I figured out I was manic-depressive.

For me,the  only real worldly changes that have to be looked out for are whether or not someone is still going to be there five years from now or how badly an episode is going to affect anyone else. I can’t react to a constantly changing world, because that’s another source of anxiety and bad feelings in and of itself, so I’d rather not worry about something thats going to cause me pain in the end.

Then there are small moments that aren’t the epitome of being completely miserable. Those idealistic pieces of memorabilia aren’t easily found, but once they do, everything changes, and for one day, everything feels alright, and in those moments, you can feel amazing. You can do anything, and nothing can make you feel any less real. That’s called mania.

But hey, who said it’s not okay to feel subsequently human?

I digress, really, depending on how bad the situation, sometimes things are easier to bounce back from, but as a whole, to put it lightly, life has quite literally made me it’s bitch, and there’s nothing I can do about it. The insanity was never my fault, but it didn’t bother me anyway.

Let the rest of the world change, I’m perfectly fine in my own little bubble.

But you wanted to know how it feels like, right? Waking up in the morning realizing you’re the very thing that makes you hate your own reflection, and every ounce of love someone ever had for you is now gone because you’re unstable, and cut up arms are always prettier than soft ones.

Let’s reiterate one last time. I’m finished with the rest of the world. Things can change, but I won’t.

But’s that’s just my illness talking.

And that’s also what happens during the lower parts of the depression, which is almost like the ‘world,’ changing me, if that makes any sense. I react differently to certain things than others do. I say things that other people may find unusual. This is because I had to grow up much faster then most people.

It’s no one’s real fault, because when you’re born, your parents aren’t, (hopefully,) sitting around you saying how much they’d like to see you suffer. But sometimes someone does something stupid. And that stupidity grows into something much larger, and because you’re already impressionable, you’re holding all of that in, until you reach a certain age and look back at your life. Then you realize that something went wrong, and that you’re no longer the only thing you’re supposed to keep safe. Because sometimes, those monsters that your parents told you never existed, suddenly become real. And they’re everywhere, but nobody can make them go away. And the rest of the world sits back and judges you for not being able to let go of things that aren’t real to them.

But you really aren’t crazy. It’s the world’s way of protecting yourself. It keeps you safe, even if you’re doing stupid things. You learn that you’re actually not a good person, and because of that, nobody loves you. And you know what? It’s okay to feel these things. You just can’t hurt yourself over them, or life sucks even more than it used to. You’re actually a half decent person when you’re not threatening to kill yourself every five minutes.

You just can’t let the monsters of the world tell you otherwise.

Analytical Essay:

In today's world, everything is constantly changing. Money is becoming of lesser value, gas prices are going up, new laws are being made and unemployment rates rising. As the world changes, people change too. It’s the natural order of things, humans do what they can to fend for themselves. In the book, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’brien, a message of the changing world and the self is conveyed through experiences by a group of characters in the army. In this book there are cases in which the world continues to change in different ways, and as it does it shifts and develops human thinking to survive and adapt for the self along with it.

Jimmy cross, a character in the book, The Things They Carried, is a lieutenant with a lot of responsibility on his hands. He is in charge of a group of army men in a division called Alpha Company. Cross had good intentions from the start when it came to his men but became unsure how to truly lead them after suffering through the loss of two members of his team. Ted Lavender and Kiowa. A passage from the book reads, “Jimmy cross remembered the kids face but not the name. That happened sometimes. He tried to treat his men as individuals but sometimes the names just escaped him.”(Pg. 172) Jimmy Cross, before coming to the army could have lived an average life, but has went through the torment of losing the men he was assigned to lead and protect. He thus has been altered by the changing world and now has a lot of things under his belt which in turn has changed the way he treats people. His men may have started off as Individual people to him, but through that experience it seems names have become less important to him, his thinking on his men has thus changed. He sees them now as only that, men in the army. This hardened attitude is his way of adapting to the change, his way of not having to experience the pain of losing “his men” anymore. Losing his men changed the way he thought of the remaining of his men in the army.

Bob “Rat” Kiley, the platoons medic, is much respected by Tim O’Brien for the way he handles his job as a medic. Rat is usually a level headed and kind man, but over time the war took its toll on him. One day while Rat and another medic assigned with him on an assignment, Mark Fossie, were waiting for Fossie’s girlfriend to answer the door. Rat expressed his distrust for the girl. “Rat shook his head. He said to Fossie, “Your decision. I was you, though, no way i’d mess around with any greenie types, not for nothing.”” (Pg. 108) Rat begins to let the weight and stress of the war weigh down on him. His trust in people begins to waiver and it shows in this quote. He notices that he needs to adapt to protect himself as he shifts along with the changing world and that doesn’t leave much room for anyone else. He brings out to Mark that he wouldn’t “mess around” with any greenie, knowing that Mary Anne is marks beloved girlfriend. Rat it appears, though, has let the world shape his thinking in that he has lost trust for certain people, and she is one of them. He let the changing world impact his thought process with this girl developing his human thinking.

Mary Anne Belle, Mark Fossie’s high school sweetheart, although Mary appears to arrive to vietnam in total innocence, she develops a respect for death and the darkness of the jungle. According to legend she retreats and disappears there. Unlike Martha, who is just a fantasy for Jimmy Cross, Mary is very real for Mark and her change is one that shatters his world and hers both. Mark and Rat were waiting for Mary Anne to come out when, “.. She stepped out of the shadows. At least for a moment she seemed to be the same pretty young girl who had arrived a few weeks earlier.” (Pg. 110) Mary Anne has it hinted about her in this quote that she has changed as a person since her arrival at the military base in Vietnam. She, as the quote brings out, was at a time a pretty young girl but it can be inferred that she has changed and is no longer that person she was because of the words "at least for a moment" implying change. Mary Anne's heart hardened due to the truth of war, and this result changed not only her but in effect made Mark Fossie a sader soul as well. This is another case of the world around a person changing their way of thinking and thus changing, ultimately, the person themselves.

Tim O’brien, the main character narrator and protagonist of the novel, is also the author of the book. In an interview with Sawyer Scott about his output on his book The Things They Carried he says, "Imagination is important in a couple of ways. One way is as a psychological means of escape. If you can lose yourself in a fantasy, then you're no longer trapped in the horror of, say, Vietnam. You're back home with your girlfriend, eating a nice dinner at the Ritz instead of C-rations."(Interview 2) Imagination is important, it is the brains way of escaping reality, helping humans dream the impossible. After all, imagination is thinking and that positive thinking or imagination can be changed if the world around you changes in a negative way before your very eyes and vise versa. Trapped in the horror of Vietnam, is how Tim felt until the world around him changed, and he was able to clear his mind and focus better on other things. This again shows when the world around us is changing, as humans we must change our thinking to change with the world.

Works Cited for Analytical Essay:

"Tim O'brien Interview." N.p., n.d. Web.

"The Things They Carried." By Tim O'Brien. 1998 N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2015.

"Robot Check." Robot Check. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2015.

Narrative Essay:

One hundred bucks is crazy money in my book. One hundred bucks can’t even afford some jeans out there, though, to put it in hindsight, and I use to wonder why money was such an important material to people. It’s pretty obvious now, money is power. And power changes people. I think back to an experience of a close cousin of mine. He and I were pretty close growing up, he is a few years older than me and lived in North Carolina but we made it work. Every year, three times a year,  my intermediate family and I would take the trip down to NC to see him and our other relatives.

My cousin, JeMario, was a good natured person, a very kind and thoughtful personality who happened to have a keen talent for music. He played the bass for as long as I can remember, and he was always pretty great at it but honestly I would have never thought he could get famous off of playing the bass. But he was talented, so much so, that one year while we were staying “down south”, as my mom referred to the trip to NC, his mother influenced him to join, a at the time popular musical career jump starting show, MTV’s Making A Band. He did and through the course of the show he survived every round up until it was just him and one other male in the finals. In the final round he did not get enough votes to win and lost to other guy, but it wasn’t a total loss he had been noticed by a lot of people for his talent on the bass instrument. A few weeks after he returned home he got a call from two big names in the media, Tyler Perry and Bruno Mars. Mr. Perry wanted my cousin to play bass for his plays, while Bruno wanted him to play bass for his live band. My cousin, being young and into Bruno Mars music, decided to go with the offer from Bruno. He left for California and began recording music and touring with Bruno. I was happy with his decision being a fan of Bruno Mars myself and I have been proud of my cousin ever since. But he isn’t the same person he was when he left that year, I believe being around the spotlight, something he was very uncommon to living in a small town in North Carolina, changed him thoroughly.

The summer after he left to go on tour, I remember hearing from my aunt JeMario was going to be in town when we went on our annual down south trip. I was overjoyed to hear this it had been a year. The first time I caught a sight of my star studded cousin back home I couldn’t tell if it was him or some clone that dressed better, sounded different, and acted different but looked exactly like him. I could hardly hear his southern accent anymore. I remember the first conversation we had when he came back, “Yo cuz! You're a big shot now huh?”

“Yeah little cousin out here making this money man.” He responded to me.

“Wow. All I know is.. That haircut is bad real bad Michael Jackson, should probably never get that again?” We both laughed.

“It’s whatever man. I got it cause’ it’s what everyone got.”

“Well, everyone else does not look good on you man.”

“Looking like everyone else is what makes you relatable and famous and paid. And that’s all that matters.”

“What man? Forget the money. Forget how you look, you got that suspect jacket on.. Wearing that is not worth all the money in the world” I laughed, “You're on tour with Bruno Mars... That must be like living a dream or something”

“Ain’t no dream unless I’m getting paid little cousin, you must not understand that money is all that matters in this business and whatever you gotta do to get it. I got the talent now I’m just looking to get much as I can man.”

JaMario wasn’t the same. I could feel it the moment I saw him, there was something off about him. His once pert and lively character had abandoned him. The glory lifestyle took it’s toll on him much sooner than anyone could have expected. JaMario had let the changes in the world around him affect his being, he went from being a kind content heart to a cold one endlessly searching for more.

Analytical Essay:

Everyone goes through important changes and phases in their lives, whether it be someone very close to them passing away, winning the lottery, or finding “the one”.  All of these things can cause a change in one’s character that greatly affects their view of the world.  In Kevin Powers’s novel The Yellow Birds, the main character, Bartle, goes through one of the most life-changing experiences possible: fighting in a war.  During his service in Afghanistan, he sees himself and many others change in many ways. Many people, when going through or having gone through a big change in their life, may feel like the whole world has changed because their world has changed.

At one point in Bartle’s time abroad, he goes AWOL in Germany, when the troops are waiting to fly back to America.  While he’s away from the base, he goes into a church and has some time alone with his thoughts.  When remembering this moment, he says, “I realized, as I stood there in the church, that there was a sharp distinction between what was remembered, what was told , and what was true. And I didn’t think I’d ever figure out which was which,” (Powers 60).  This is an interesting way of thinking of the human memory, because often times, those three things are seen as the same thing.  Bartle, as he remembers certain events in the war and is talking to the priest in the church, realizes that his mind wants to remember things differently than how they happened.  After he had these traumatic experiences, his view of the world was changed, although he didn’t notice at the time. His changed perspective caused him to believe that things had happened differently than they actually had.

Kevin Powers, when talking in an interview about life in combat compared with civilian life, said, "As human beings, we have the blessing and the curse that we're able to adapt to almost anything. No matter how extreme the circumstances you're in, they become normal,” (Sherr).  The Yellow Birds is written in a way such that one chapter Bartle will be fighting in Al Tafar, Afghanistan, and the next chapter he will be back home in Richmond, Virginia after the war.  The way the book jumps around like this, the reader can see a clearer comparison between his experiences in the war and how they affected him once he was back home.  This quote says that “no matter how extreme the circumstances you’re in, they become normal” (Sherr), meaning that even when Bartle was fighting in Afghanistan, at some point he became so used to it that he felt like that was normal.  The reader notices this once Bartle is back home in Richmond, because he goes out and shoots his gun at the ground to relax; the fact that this action is relaxing instead of stressful or exciting means that he is used to it, and that he believes it is normal in the world he is living in.

When Bartle is back in America and reflecting on his current life, he talks about whether he thinks he and his life are normal.  During this reflection, he says, “The details of the world in which we live are always secondary to the fact that we must live in them,” (Powers 224).  What this means is that humans can never have experiences in life or views of their world without either of those being affected by their own thoughts and feelings.  Bartle is acknowledging this, by saying that even though he feels like his life is normal, he knows that this is partially because of his past experiences and feelings.  If he was completely separated from his past, his thoughts, and his feelings, he would see that this is not normal behavior.  However, there is no way for him to perceive his world outside of his own mind.

Many people who have never fought in a war may feel like there is no way in which they can connect to a soldier.  While it is true that a soldier’s experience is incredibly different from a civilian’s, the fact that a life-changing moment or period in one’s life can change his or her perception of the world is something that applies to everyone.  Whether someone is a civilian who has just had a child, or a soldier who has just lost a close friend in combat, both situations will greatly affect a person.  This is a uniting factor between two different groups of people that should be remembered when civilians connect with soldiers.

Works Cited for Analytical Essay:

Powers, Kevin. The Yellow Birds. New York: Little, Brown, 2012. Print.

Sherr, Lynn. "A Soldier's Story: Returning Home From Iraq." Parade's Community Table.

Parade Publications Inc., 21 Oct. 2012. Web. 08 Jan. 2015.

http://communitytable.com/125987/lynnsherr/21-iraq-veteran-kevin-powers-interview-

the-yellow-birds/.

Narrative Essay:

Ugh, I hate everyone.  Why is everyone so annoying?  Wait...are they talking about me right now?

These are just average thoughts I have had sitting in class, on the bus, or pretty much anywhere when I have gone through more depressed periods in my life.  We all have these types of thoughts every now and then, but they were an almost constant occurrence in my head.  Someone walking in front of me would do something mildly annoying and I would berate them in my head, my mood having been ruined by them during the rest of my walk to school.  This negative attitude towards even strangers is just an example of how I viewed the world in this part of my life: annoying, boring, and joyless.

One way in which my perspective on the world and my life was changed is that I became much more paranoid about my friends or people at school talking about me.  It wasn’t because I thought I was so important, I just thought people were talking behind my back, when I left the room or walked down the hall past them.  A few times, I got so worried about it that I actually would ask one friend if another had said anything about me, or if they thought someone didn’t like me.  Always, the answer was something like, “No, why would you think that?” or “No, why would they be talking about you?” and whoever I was asking would look at me funny.  I’m sure that at least once, the person I was asking about found out I had been asking about them, and it probably annoyed them or made them uncomfortable.  At the time, I never thought about that, but now that I am outside of my depressive state of mind, it seems clear that that must have happened.

Another big affect of my depression was boredom and indifference towards the world around me.  Often times, I just wouldn’t bother to make any plans over the weekend, and because I had no plans, I would start on this train of thought that I didn’t have any plans because no one wanted to hang out with me, when in reality it was just because I didn’t ask anyone.  This would cause me to just sit at home all weekend, incredibly bored and often unhappy.  My parents would suggest all sorts of things to do, and to each option I’d say that I “didn’t feel like it” or I would just say no.  At the time, I really didn’t have any interest in any of the things they were suggesting; I would even think to myself, “Why don’t I want to do anything?  All of those things seem so boring.”  At that point in time, I saw the world as very boring, with nothing exciting going on in it.  Again, thinking back, most of the things my parents suggested were pretty interesting, but that just isn’t how I viewed my world.  

Possibly the worst affect my depressed state of mind had on myself and my life was the actual change in my personality.  I was much more negative and rude or mean towards both my parents, my friends, and my boyfriend.  I believed I was behaving normally, but at one point or another, all of the people in my life confronted me about my behavior, and in some cases it was too late to fix the damage I had done without even realizing it.  Even in the cases where my apologies were accepted, I still felt terribly guilty about the feelings I had hurt and the anger and frustration I had caused.  This would send me even deeper into depression.  Once again, in these situations I had believed that I was behaving like my normal self, even though it was obvious later on that I hadn’t been.

While I will likely never be able to fully relate to the life and experiences of a soldier, I feel that the factor of a distorted reality can apply to both people like me and people from the army.  Like Bartle, I believed that my abnormal behavior was nothing out of the ordinary, even though to others the change was obvious.  The effects of my depression included ruined relationships, lost time, and inaccurate world views.  The effects of Bartle’s return and assimilation back into civilian life were changed relationships, time wasted being angry and depressive, and a distorted view of the world.  This is perhaps the only connection I can make between myself and the character of Bartle.  But it is a strong connection, and a thought-provoking one; a connection that will stay with me as I continue to learn how to connect with others who are different from me.

Analytical Essay:

People experience death everyday. A family member could die of cancer, a family pet could pass away or soldiers could kill or watch their friends get killed. In the book, “The Things They Carried”, by Tim O’Brien, people are affected by their changing world everyday because they are in a war. One of the biggest changes that affects them would be death. Since there are so many different people in the war, reactions to death would differ from person to person. The relationship of the changing world and the self can be different according to how they deal with strong emotions.

Azar was one of the first characters in the book that stood out as someone who wasn’t really the nicest guy in the platoon. He blew up a puppy, made jokes about people when they died and always had something snarky to say. When the main character, Tim O’Brien killed is first man, Azar was one of the first people to comment on it. “Oh man, you fuckin’ trashed the fucker” Azar said. “You scrambled his sorry-self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like Shredded Fuckin’ Wheat.” (pg. 125) Azar needed to deal with death in a way that wouldn’t affect himself directly. He did this by making jokes about the dead and he didn’t try to comfort the person who was shocked by the death. In the quote above, he talks to O’Brien in a way that shows that he is tough and that death doesn’t affect him. He doesn’t know how else to deal with the fact that someone was blown up in front of him. He doesn’t have a filter, so he says whatever comes to mind. Since he has gotten to war, his world has been changing with every death that Azar sees. He has created a person who says that he isn’t fazed by death so that he seems tough, like society’s image of a soldier should be.

When O’Brien killed the man, it was his first experience with death that he had caused. He fills up two chapters talking about how the body looked and what people were saying to him. He also made up a narrative about the man that he killed. He imagined the dead man’s education and his family and his personality. “He liked books. He wanted someday to be a teacher of mathematics. At night, lying on his mat, he could not picture himself doing these brave things his father had done, or his uncles, or the heroes of the stories.” (pg. 125) O’Brien can’t stop replaying the scene of the death over in his head after it’s happened. All he can do is stare at the body and repeat the details over and over again. To cope with the death, he makes up a story about the body. Some people would think that this is a bad idea because then O’Brien would be seeing him as someone who is equal to him with a life and with people who cared about him, which would then make O’Brien have grief and empathy for the person he just killed. O’Brien would want to distance himself from the person, not see the person as someone just like him. In the book he never explains why he does it or if it makes him feel better. In O’Brien’s changing world, he is someone who kills people and that makes him feel guilty and sad.

Death of a real person isn’t the only death that someone in war can see. In one chapter, a man is telling a story about how one soldier was able to arrange his girlfriend to come to Vietnam. No one had ever done it before so people weren’t sure what to expect. The girlfriend’s name was Mary Anne and everybody loved her when she got to camp. The only problem was that she wanted to be in the war. She was taken by the war and she would go on midnight stake-outs with the men. “Vietnam made her glow in the dark. She wanted more, she wanted to penetrate deeper into the mystery of herself, and after a time the wanting became needing, which turned then to craving.” (pg 114) Mary Anne became so interested in the war that a part of her old self died. She didn’t think that she would ever be able to go back to America after what she’d experienced in Vietnam. This is because she came into the war innocent and since the war was such a shock and adrenaline producing, she wanted to stay forever in the war. Before the war she was someone who wore headbands and cotton shorts but after the war she was someone who wore a human tongue necklace and went around barefoot. Her way of dealing with the war and shock of death is by becoming a completely different person.

In an interview, Tim O’Brien talks about how he noticed different people coping with the changes in their world. He said that a way that was commonly used was imagination. “Imagination is important in a couple of ways. One way is as a psychological means of escape. If you can lose yourself in a fantasy, then you're no longer trapped in the horror of, say, Vietnam. You're back home with your girlfriend, eating a nice dinner at the Ritz instead of C-rations.” Throughout the whole book, people have to create a fantasy so that they can deal with death and war. He said this because he wanted to confirm that this a feeling that can happen with the war. He is saying that by pretending that you are in a fantasy world can help you deal with the war and the deaths that happen in the war. Without a way of coping, war can be stressful and quite possibly the worst event in someone’s life.

In war, people’s lives are changing and almost all of the people need a way to deal with the changes. People have to figure out what works best for them and sometimes they don’t even realize that they are finding a way of dealing with their problems. Because of these changes in someone’s world, they react in whatever way they can cope with the changes.

Works Cited for Analytical Essay:

-Sawyer, Scott. "In the Name of Love: An Interview With Tim O'Brien." Mars Hill Review. Winter/Spring 1996. Web. October 20 2009.

Analytical Essay:

Everyone is inspired by something and what they do with their inspiration makes them happy. Tim O’Brien, the author of The Things They Carried loves writing and he is passionate about his experiences in the war, so his book is about the war. He wants people to experience the same emotions he felt by reading his book and to see what it feels like to be in the war, and how scary it is. Writers express themselves by making the reader feel their emotions in the story in a way where readers know what happened in order, but also show how it changed their life and how readers are affected by it.

People look back at their experience to not make mistakes and make their future better. The past is important because people remember to go back to it and rethink what they did wrong, and want to try to do better in the present. In the book The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien says, “And sometimes remember it will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except that story” (pg. 38). Being in the war for Tim was not easy. Those kind of memories people do not forget because it’s a fear they face. This shows that events that happen to people in the past are connected to the future because there is something new in each situation where people learn something new. It gives a new perspective on things people do not think of, but also shows what life has for people, and that a lot of different stories stay in people’s mind and they remember it. They remember what happened and how it could affect them.

There are things people want to remember from their stories or from stories they’ve heard. It is hard for writers to not have an obsession about one topic because that topic is  something that inspires them, and it is something they look forward to share with the world to let  people know what is happening and how people are affected by things like wars. In the book Tim O’Brien says, “I feel guilty sometimes. Forty-three years old and I'm still writing war stories. My daughter Kathleen tells me it's an obsession...I guess, she's right: I should forget it. But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is your life, at the intersection of past and present… As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come. That's the real obsession” (pg. 34). Here this quote talks about how no matter what people say people follow their conscience. That strong inner voice shows them what they can achieve and that it is something they want to do. A person’s inner voice can help them express themselves and what’s on their mind. Tim O’Brien listened to what his daughter had to say, but he still thought of being a writer as something that not only writing inspires him, but wars as well. He thinks about writing as his future because that’s what he likes to do even though some of the things are not true, for example in his book he had a daughter, but in the real world he does not have one.

As a person Tim O’Brien wants people to know what it means to go through something that stays with him his whole life. War is something people do not forget because these are feelings and emotions that will stay with a person even though they will move on. Tim says that even if the story is made up he wants people to know what he felt and show what it was like to go through something really hard and frightening. He did not think of what others thought about him writing and said, “But listen. Even that story is made up. I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth.” (pg. 179). Sometimes there are stories where when they are said and made up a little they come out as a better story, than a real story that happened. Tim O’Brien wanted to show how factual stories are not always the best way to explain an emotion one feels in a certain moment or situation.

From the interview “In the Name of Love” with Tim O’Brien, he expresses and answers the questions that are important for readers to know about because they can see what Tim meant and thought about writing his book. He wanted to let people know how it feels to be in the war even though it was not all the factual. In the article An Interview with Tim O'Brien Tim says, "Events, especially those that carry elements of trauma, tend to get scrambled in terms of chronology. And I try to present them that way as much as I can in my writing. I don't clearly sort out for the reader what happened first, second, third, and fourth in a causal chain. I take this approach because I think it's the way our memories often work.” When writers want to tell the story they want the reader know the order of what happened, but they also want the reader to feel what they went through. It is easy to just write a story and say what happened, but writing it in a way that the reader understands the feelings that are happening in the story is very important in literature. It means the writer achieves the goal in writing something that makes people feel everything they went through or even when a story was made up. Stories that are made up can be well written just like real stories, but it is in writer’s hands to see if it connects to a person and their feelings.

When it comes to feelings and emotions it is hard for people to feel what the writer is trying to portray with their writing. In order to feel their emotions the book needs to show situations where readers can imagine the place. It is not easy to do that, but Tim O’Brien did a good job by giving a lot of details so people connect to his story. He also showed people how it feels to be in the war so others can imagine it and realize how they work hard to be there.

Works Cited for Analytical Essay:

1. O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway, 1998. Print.

2. Sawyer, Scott. "An Interview with Tim O'Brien." In the Name of Love. Mars Hill Review 4, n.d. Web. 8 Jan. 2015. <http://www.leaderu.com/marshill/mhr04/tim1.html>

Narrative Essay:

“Oh no. I don’t know what to write about. What should I do?”

“Write about something that you usually don’t tell people because it’s hard to talk about it, ” said my friend Hannah.

Hannah and I became best friends during freshman year. The first time we met was asking each other “What class do you have?” and looking at our schedules, and realizing we have the same classes. Going to our first class was weird and we had that silent/awkward walk to the classroom because we had no idea what to say. I remember having Bio-chem as our first class.

Freshman year we wrote more analytical essays, than personal essays. That’s when we learned to write thesis and how to put all information together to form an essay. The first English class during sophomore year was different comparing to my classes in middle school and freshman year. When we went to the classroom Ms. Pahomov explained to us that we will focus on writing workshop. I had no idea what it was, but in my head I just thought, “Oh no I hate writing.” When we started writing our first essay I started with a personal essay because I thought it will be easy, but that was not true exactly. I did not know what to write about and I did not like writing in general. I started my personal essay with writing about me coming to the U.S. and my first years here. Then I wrote about my grandpa, which was something I did not tell people because it’s a really personal topic to me.

Writing personal essays showed me a way where I can tell people my stories, but also express my feelings. I am a shy person and do not share all my stories with everyone. I take my time to start trusting people because I had situations where people would talk and tell my personal things even though they said they wouldn’t. It is hard for me to start trusting from the beginning. Hannah’s thought about my essays made her emotional after she read them.

“When reading Malwina’s writing I was supposed to just edit it, but once I read the whole story I actually got very into it. I ended up learning more about her through her personal essays. It’s been a while since I read one, but there are still two stories that she wrote last year that I can recall. Her pieces were memorable allowing me to remember the ones she wrote last school year. They were about her grandfather and one about her dad. Malwina did a great job with details in her personal essay about grandpa that I felt emotional. I could imagine what happened and the story brought tears to my eyes.” said Hannah when I talked to her recently.

Usually when I talk to my family about things that happened most of them are emotional and do not like to share these stories. It is hard for them to say things like that because it is something they would want to keep between people in our family. Writing something and sharing how my grandpa was fighting with cancer was something completely different. I did not really tell my family that I wrote that essay because of the fact them not feeling comfortable to talk to people they do not know about personal emotions. From writing these essays I feel like there is another way to express my feelings to others. It is easier to write it and let people read it because if I were to talk to them in person I do not think I would be able because I would get really emotional.

Expressing my feelings through essays feels better because I do not have to face some of the situations that I would not feel comfortable to talk about. I was really surprised that Hannah after reading my personal essays was emotional because I would not think my writing would make someone feel what I felt at the same time. Expressing feelings is something challenging  because it is something you share with readers that you are not sure you can trust, but it is a way to show and make readers feel what you felt.