But we wanted to whack Tim the Writer on the head with a guava fruit the first time we read "Good Form," so forgive us if we're a little sensitive on the topic. Tim the Soldier does have some elements of truth to him, and he wasn't completely fabricated by Tim the Writer. He is a fictional character, invented by… Tim the Writer But Tim the Soldier is not a real person, despite the fact that he shares the author's name. If Tim the Soldier were a real person, he might actually be a little scary. And in "The Ghost Soldiers," he gets sucked into a quest for revenge that begins to symbolize the war itself. In another-"In the Field"-he inadvertently causes the death of Kiowa, his best friend.
In fact, he's only an active participant in three war stories: "The Man I Killed," "In the Field," and "The Ghost Soldiers." In "The Man I Killed," he can't look away from a young man he killed with a grenade. Heck, he doesn't even mention himself and what he carries in "The Things They Carried"! But, in all that noticing, we sure don't learn much about his personality. He notices the way the light moves in the trees and the grotesque and awesome beauty of napalm. He's the guy who watches Azar's antics and Henry Dobbins's random kindness. He's the guy who listens to everyone else's stories. (This is something that we'll be taking up with Tim the Writer in a few paragraphs.) In some of the stories, we don't even know that O'Brien is there, but assume that he is, because, well, he's the one who wrote the book, right?Įventually, though, O'Brien settles in and becomes something of a nonentity. We don't hear this stuff chronologically, mind you: we get it in bits and pieces. Most of the men in his platoon-Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Kiowa, Azar-have been in Vietnam for a lot longer than he has, and he doesn't want to seem weak in front of them. He went to the war because he was embarrassed not to.
#Tim obrien full
He was Phi Beta Kappa in college and had a full scholarship to graduate school at Harvard when he got drafted. He never expected to go to war in the first place.
Tim the Soldier is kind of a mess at first. They're all the same person, but it's important for you to keep the three separate, so we'll do the same. There are three important Tim O'Briens in the story: Tim the Soldier, Tim the Writer, and Timmy the Kid.
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