"The Things They Carried" Ethan Cantrell Post 1

Analyze a character in your story.  How are they characterized by the author?  What is their role in the story?  What do you think of them?  Why?

     It is our narrator, Tim O'Brien, who has interested me the most in this story.  The chapter focusing on him was the first to really pull me in.  I suppose this is because he's extremely different from how I expected him to be.  If you had asked me prior to reading this book what Tim O'Brien was like before joining to the war, I probably would've predicted him to be a fiercely patriotic young man who couldn't wait to go off and fight.  It turns out that I couldn't have been more wrong, because Tim O'Brien is actually a coward.  He was opposed to the war, he had zero desire to join the military and fight.  And one day he receives a notice that he will be drafted, and this terrifies him, so much so that he suffers what amounted to a mental breakdown and fled north, in an attempt to make it to Canada so he could avoid the draft.   He shows this fear in the quote "Beyond all this, or at the very center, was the raw fact of terror.  I did not want to die.  Not ever.  But certainly not then, not there, not in a wrong war.  Driving up Main Street, past the courthouse and the Ben Franklin store, I sometimes felt the fear spreading inside me like weeds" (O'Brien 42).  I empathize with him on this.  War means death, and death is scary.  Scary to Tim O'Brien, scary to all the soldiers who served in Vietnam, on both sides, scary to more or less everyone, myself included. 

     There were two great fears he had in this time: going to war, and fleeing to avoid it.  The first one has already been explained, but the second reason is the most interesting to me.  He was afraid of the ridicule and mocking he would be subjected to if he dodged the draft and fled to Canada, as he states in this quote: "I feared losing the respect of my parents.  I feared the law.  I feared ridicule and censure" (O'Brien 42).  In the end, it was that fear which overpowered the other and forced him to go to war.  "I was a coward.  I went to the war" (O'Brien 58).  That sets him apart from most other men who were drafted.  The ones who were scared were scared of the prospect of fighting more than they were of the idea of being mocked for fleeing.  But O'Brien is instead more terrified of ridicule than the war, and ultimately that's what causes him to join. 

So I like Tim O'Brien quite a lot so far, because I can understand his situation, and his fear.