I first read this short story in high school, and I honestly didn't like it then. I felt it just rambled and that it didn't offer much of a "story" at all (keep in mind that my idea of a good read then was the newest Nicholas Sparks' novel). But now that I'm older and I think I appreciated it a lot more.
I think a lot of the times when one thinks of the military they think of them as one unit, not individual people. "The Things They Carried" forces readers to see each person in the unit as a individual by describing something they carried with them. It allowed me to realize how something as simple as M&M's may be a sweet reminder of home to someone off at war. The author does a good job of describing the guilt Jimmy Cross feels when Ted Lavender dies, in addition to the anxiety O'Brien feels toward the situation with his sweetheart back home. When I first read the story years ago I didn't like the lack of dialogue, but I think for this story this works because sometimes long dialouges don't have to be exchanged in order for a story to occur.
You're doing a good job of recognizing how descriptions of objects like M and Ms work to characterize emotions . . . There is dialogue here, but it's rare because so much of the story is summarized rather than shown in scene, something we'll discuss in a future class.
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