Insanity In The Things They Carried

A soldier who goes into war will never come out being the same man. The psychological stress of war makes every soldier lose their mind, in both clinical and/or abstract terms. The clinical definition of insanity is “a severely disordered state of the mind usually occurring as a specific disorder” (Merriam-Webster). The abstract definition is “to deal with heightened stress in un-methodistic ways”. In The Things They Carried, by writer and Vietnam war veteran, Tim O’Brien, every character deals with being in the brutal circumstances of the Vietnam war by either using drugs, creating a delusion, or by simply giving up all forms of hope. So the question is, “How would you define insanity for a soldier who is at war?”. The definition of insanity …show more content…
It also shows the psychological effects that the war had on each character. Tim O’Brien is the writer of this book but he is also the protagonist of this novel. O’Brien describes a man he killed in My Khe with a deep, detailed description. He does this due to a natural human instinct to make connections to the stranger he had killed. Soldiers are expected to just aim and shoot, but humans are not machines, they have emotions and want to make emotional connections to their surroundings (Ford). He makes up a life story for the man and beats himself up over the fact that this man would have been a “gentle soul” (O’Brien 37). Ted Lavender is a man who dies in the beginning of the novel and whose death adds to the psychological stress of his fellow soldiers. His character is described as a heavy marijuana user (O’Brien 11). He uses this drug so that he can move through the functions of war in a numb, dream like state. Ted shows signs of abstract insanity in the concept that he always carries tranquilizers with him. He does this so that if he is shot, he won 't be in pain. “Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Ke in mid-April” (O’Brien 21). The narrator excuses Ted Lavender for his drug use because the other soldiers understand the need to detach oneself from …show more content…
They are all just young men trying to survive a bloody, brutal war on soil that is not there own. In The Things They Carried, the men used their abstract forms of insanity to hide themselves from reality because the reality of their lives is terrifying and foreign. The only cure for soldiers insanity is to go home and try to move on from all the struggles a soldier goes through. Being equipped with all of this information, one question must be asked again, “How would you define insanity for a soldier who is at war?”. Abstractly or