Baggage

In response to my thesis: (Which essentially states that there is a clear emphasis on the physical and emotional baggage each character carries with them, and often times it is the things that weigh the least that tend to be the most burdensome).

After reading The Things They Carried what is the most striking is how O’Brien wants us to see his novel, not as a war story, but instead as a story about love. Although it is true that while in the war O’Brien carried around a number of things, what he left the war permanently carrying was not a helmet, or twenty pounds of ammunition, but rather the weight of each war story. Coming out of the war, O’Brien is a different person, all innocence lost. The way he sees the world has changed and all he is left to constantly think about is what happened in Vietnam. The baggage from the war is weightlessly suffocating.

“I never spoke much about the war, certainly not in detain, and yet ever since my return I had been talking about it virtually nonstop through my writing. Telling stories seemed a natural inevitable process, like clearing the throat” (O’Brien 151).

Similarly, in Cat’s Cradle once each one of Hoenikker children is in possession of ice-nine, they are suddenly burdened with not just the physical invention itself, but more importantly the emotional baggage that comes along with it. Having seen what ice-nine had the power to do to their father, it is fair to say that each child walks around daily feeling the emotional pressures that come along with carrying a piece of their frozen father; a permanent reminder of his death. Furthermore, knowing that they hold the fate of the world in their hands, adds another layer of emotional complexity to what each child has to carry around with them.