The Importance of Women

The Things They Carried is a short autobiographical collection of stories by Tim O’Brien. Although the stories mainly focus on Vietnam War memories, O’Brien includes important female characters. Each female character represents significant values and emotions; Martha — love and danger, Mary Anne Bell — the loss of innocence, and Linda — memory and death. 

One of the most important female characters is Martha who is introduced in the first story “The Things They Carry”. Martha is described as Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s friend from college.  Cross keeps all letters and photographs of her with him and all times and he often thinks about whether she dates other guys, in fact he understands that Martha does not love him and gives him false hope.  While the alpha company leaves her operation one day, Lieutenant Cross cannot concentrate due to his thoughts of his distant love Martha. Due to his wandering thoughts, his friend Ted lavender gets injured, and after a brutal injury, he dies. This tragic event leads Jimmy cross to reflect on the love of Martha and to analyze the consequences of his obsessive thoughts about her. In this story “The Things They Carried” Martha symbolizes love, as a most valuable human feeling,  and danger since its attitude leads to tragic consequences.

 Another major female character is Mary Anne Bell, who appears in the story “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”. Mary Anne Bell is described as a curious girl in nice clothes who closed Vietnam with Mark Fossie. While  In Vietnam she learns the local language, communicates with other soldiers, and learns how to handle weapons. This story symbolizes not only the transformation of Mary Anne come up but also every soldier. The author draws a parallel between Mary Anne Bell and how she loses her femininity upon arriving in Vietnam, and how men enter war inexperienced and progress into strong tempered men. Due to this parallel Mary Anne Bell symbolizes the loss of innocence of all who go through the horrors of war. 

 The final character Linda appears in “Lives of the Dead” and signifies memory in death. The last story depicts O’Brien’s memories of his first love. At the beginning of the war, he thinks of his classmate Linda, with whom he went to the cinema with. He was in love with her but later discovered she had a severe incurable illness. After some time, Linda passed away, and O’Brien remembers her funeral. The author retells this event of his first experience with death and analyzes how in the contacts that memory is capable of giving me eternal life to people who were once dear to the heart. 
The parallels O’Brien uses between the seemingly unimportant female characters in The Things They Carried provide important emotions for the other characters in the war, and  O’Brien includes them in his story because this allows him to interact with the reader within the text without actually interacting with the reader personally while depicting traumatic situations from the past.