Content Category
Literary Criticism
Abstract/Description
In this paper, I analyze gender roles in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried arguing that war causes American society to shift, and as a result, expected gender roles and the understanding of expected behavior change. Correlating the soldiers’ understanding of what it means to be American directly to their understanding of gender, I explain that changing what it means to be men alters their idea of what it means to be citizens of the United States. Because the soldiers can no longer be identified by their gender, nor can they identify themselves as Americans, they lose their understanding of war and what it means to be fighting in it. I conclude with the claim that the soldiers, after having their complete sense of identity destroyed and losing their purpose in fighting the war, cannot exist and function in a society where traditional roles and definitions are so firmly established.
Copyright and Licensing of My Content
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Origin of Submission
as part of a class
Faculty Involvement
Jamin Rowan; Trent Hickman
Location
4116 JFSB
Start Date
18-3-2016 9:00 AM
End Date
18-3-2016 10:30 AM
Included in
Who Wears the Pants: The Unraveling of Gender in "The Things They Carried"
4116 JFSB
In this paper, I analyze gender roles in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried arguing that war causes American society to shift, and as a result, expected gender roles and the understanding of expected behavior change. Correlating the soldiers’ understanding of what it means to be American directly to their understanding of gender, I explain that changing what it means to be men alters their idea of what it means to be citizens of the United States. Because the soldiers can no longer be identified by their gender, nor can they identify themselves as Americans, they lose their understanding of war and what it means to be fighting in it. I conclude with the claim that the soldiers, after having their complete sense of identity destroyed and losing their purpose in fighting the war, cannot exist and function in a society where traditional roles and definitions are so firmly established.