It's the little things that impress me.

As far as themes go in O’Brien’s writings, I’m starting to notice that he likes describing things and situations before actually enacting them out in his writing.  Perhaps my favorite theme I keep finding throughout the readings is the constant theme of being reminded that every soldier has as much mortality as the next.  It’s that reminder that constantly strikes fear in the soldiers the second they see a dead body (as depicted throughout the entire story of “The Man I Killed”) or another soldier die (As seen in “How to Tell a True War Story” when Lemon dies).  Another thing I seem to notice he does a lot is the way his characters talk to each other.  Typically in books you see characters talking to each other in a well-thought out manner, mainly due to the fact that the writer is in full control of whatever they say or do, but O’Brien writes almost as if the characters are the ones narrating their own parts of the story.  For example, in “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien writes, “Then he said, “Man I’m sorry.”  Then later he said, “Why not talk about it?”  Then he said, “Come on, man talk.”” (The Things They Carried 124).  It’s a little hard to describe, but what I take from this is that you can actually envision the way Kiowa was speaking to Tim, how he was speaking and kind of cut himself off, and resumed the rest of his thought.  It’s also seen in “Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong” when Rat Kiley and Mitchell Sanders are talking to each other, “Rat Kiley stopped there, almost in midsentence, which drove Mitchell Sanders crazy.  “What’s next?” he said.  “Next?”  “The Girl, what happened to her?”” (The Things They Carried 107).  In this short exchange we get to see the two characters talking to each other, but what makes this a bit unique is that we see Rat Kiley mishear what Sanders told him.  Not sure as to why I find this so amusing.  It’s probably because we see some sort of imperfect dialogue between the two, something that I’ve rarely seen in writing dialogue.  It’s the little things like that that impress me in Tim O’Brien’s style; perhaps I’m easily impressed, but I’d like to imagine it’s more than that.