The chapter in which Tim and Azar prank Jorgensen during his night post really shows a lot about Tim’s personality, as well as irony about the situation. It appears that Tim is out for revenge on Jorgensen for leaving him behind when he got shot for the second time, but Tim already feels he has been apologized to and says “I hated him for making me stop hating him”. Jorgensen felt pretty calm the whole time and showed no resentment towards Tim, however Tim still felt guilty for how he reacted towards Jorgensen although they had already forgiving one another. This guilt and some sense of revenge brought him to pull the prank on him during that night. Truly he still feels empty afterwards and Jorgensen still keeps his cool, and by the end they resolve their tensions for the most part.
The end of the book The Things They Carried really reflected upon Tim’s childhood and his reflections on the war and on his relationship with Linda when he was very young. He sums up all these events as his life story as he goes back to his childhood and the war he feels like he is in a place, a sort of serene place “where there are no brain tumors and no funeral homes, where there are no bodies at all”. (245) He realizes in the end that the reason he wrote this story and wants to share it with all is that he doesn’t want the story of Tim’s his own life’s story to die out.
Andy Jones
O’Brien Tim, The Things They Carried, Boston, MA. Broadway Books, 1990. Print
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