Wednesday, July 7, 2010

The Things They Carried: Juxtaposition-Page 151


"...from Vietnam to graduate school, from Quang Ngai to Harvard, from one world to another."


Compared to many soldiers who come back from war and aren't sure what exactly to do with their lives, Tim O'Brien had it pretty easy. His switch from "war to peace" was a fairly simple one. I think it's amazing that he was capable of coming home and just moving on with his life. I give him a lot of credit for such a hard thing to do. But as he describes his goodbye from war to his return to normalcy, O'Brien uses juxtaposition. The purpose of this is to show how truly different these two parts of his life were from one another. His comparisons prove how much change he went through in such little time. O'Brien describes Vietnam and the United States as two different worlds. He makes me appreciate the fact that I haven't had to go through such a tough experience with such huge adjustments. Through O'Brien's one statement above, I understand that any person who hasn't experienced war for themselves cannot possibly fathom how different the two lifestyles can be.




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