The Things They Carried Symbolism, Imagery & Allegory

We first learn about the sewage field in "Speaking of Courage," when Norman Bowker can't stop driving around a lake while he thinks about what happened to Kiowa. Kiowa, the most moral character in...

The young man represents all of the faceless Vietnamese dead. There were hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese dead, and many went unidentified, burned by napalm or buried by the American soldiers....

Mary Anne is the embodiment of American arrogance in Vietnam. She arrives dressed in her pink sweater and culottes, fresh faced and curious. She wants to know about everything. She treats the de...

So, O'Brien didn't really work in a meatpacking plant the summer before he went to Vietnam, and he didn't go up to the Canadian border to try to get away from the war and then chicken out and retur...