Content Category
Literary Criticism
Abstract/Description
In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a unique brotherhood develops among the soldiers. The responsibilities and terrors faced in the war bring the men together in a binding pact of loyalty. By joining the battalion, an individual enlists as part of the “membership in the family, the blood fraternity.” This comradery runs deep enough that the soldiers feel as though they are true “brothers” (185). When the soldiers leave the boonies and their familial pact and “become a civilian,” they experience a “new sense of separation” from their brothers that equates to feelings of betrayal (185, 184). The creation of a “blood fraternity,” and then the collapse of such when soldiers leave the combat zone, calls for a deeper analysis of what this implies about the meaning of loyalty itself and how it changes when soldiers find themselves on the sidelines. This paper analyzes the way O’Brien has altered the meaning of loyalty for soldiers in war to represent the creation of a family away at war that is dependent upon sustained presence in the battalion. Further, it analyzes how this new understanding shifts once the unity and stability of the community has disintegrated when loyalty is lost and how this affects the reader’s understanding of betrayal and insecurity. Ultimately, I argue that any given soldier that succumbs to the affects of betrayal and revenge will fall victim to cruelty, which is defined by O’Brien as an independent agent and being capable of transforming the nature of a man to be governed by selfish motives and malicious actions. This significantly exhibits that the true enemy of war is not a foreign country but the independent agent Cruelty that is able to victimize men and turn them against one another.
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Origin of Submission
as part of a class
Faculty Involvement
Jamin Rowan
The Things They Carried: An Analysis of Loyalty and its Disintegration in the Combat Zone
In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a unique brotherhood develops among the soldiers. The responsibilities and terrors faced in the war bring the men together in a binding pact of loyalty. By joining the battalion, an individual enlists as part of the “membership in the family, the blood fraternity.” This comradery runs deep enough that the soldiers feel as though they are true “brothers” (185). When the soldiers leave the boonies and their familial pact and “become a civilian,” they experience a “new sense of separation” from their brothers that equates to feelings of betrayal (185, 184). The creation of a “blood fraternity,” and then the collapse of such when soldiers leave the combat zone, calls for a deeper analysis of what this implies about the meaning of loyalty itself and how it changes when soldiers find themselves on the sidelines. This paper analyzes the way O’Brien has altered the meaning of loyalty for soldiers in war to represent the creation of a family away at war that is dependent upon sustained presence in the battalion. Further, it analyzes how this new understanding shifts once the unity and stability of the community has disintegrated when loyalty is lost and how this affects the reader’s understanding of betrayal and insecurity. Ultimately, I argue that any given soldier that succumbs to the affects of betrayal and revenge will fall victim to cruelty, which is defined by O’Brien as an independent agent and being capable of transforming the nature of a man to be governed by selfish motives and malicious actions. This significantly exhibits that the true enemy of war is not a foreign country but the independent agent Cruelty that is able to victimize men and turn them against one another.