Grief and Trauma in O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried’ and Krauss’s ‘History of Love’

Running head: ARGUMENTATIVE ENGLISH ESSAY 1
Argumentative English Essay
Student’s name
Instructor’s name
Date

ARGUMENTATIVE ENGLISH ESSAY 2
Grief and Trauma in O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried’
In this book grief and trauma has been displayed in different characters who differently
react to the situation. The characters are the narrator, his platoon leader in Vietnam War and a
soldier. Tim O’Brien, Jimmy Cross and Norman Bowker respectively. The narrator is constantly
telling stories and talking about his other written books. Whereby, he says that telling stories is a
way of reacting to grief and trauma because he is trying to work through trauma (O’Brien, 2009).
Most importantly, he is making a coherent a story so as to transform his traumatic experiences to
a narrative memory. However, this turns out to be a failure because his stories are not in a
chronological order. This is caused by the fact there are stories he does not want to tell because
he is yet to work through them. This indicates that once one’s grief leads to trauma it is hard to
do away with it. Therefore, an exploration will be done showing how grief and trauma has been
displayed differently by different characters within different situations in O’Brien’s work and
grief plus loss in the work of Nicole Krauss.
Jimmy Cross on the other side, represses his trauma during the war and after. His two
experience of trauma are deaths of two soldiers. Trauma in these cases came as result of him
feeling guilty for their deaths due to the fact that as their platoon leader, he was responsible for
them for them hence was supposed to avoid such from happening. The first case being that of
Ted Lavender who was shot while on his way back after peeing Jimmy felt guilty for the death
because he was not attentive rather thinking about his girlfriend Martha (O’Brien, 2011). As a
result “he hated himself and felt shame as trauma hit him because that was something he had to
carry like stone in the stomach for the rest of the war” (O’Brien, pp.166). The second case is the
death of Kiowa which happens as a result of Jimmy setting up their camp on a field which was
described as big and swampy by the villagers. Thus, the fact that he could avoided this from