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Applied Literary Terms
Name that story!
Character Names
Characters II: quotes
RANDO
100

"The sun made me squint. Twenty years. A lot like yesterday, a lot like never. In a way, maybe, I'd gone under with Kiowa" (178)

juxtaposition in passage of time, metaphor of going under

100

Kiowa implores Tim to come away from a spot and to talk about the incident that has him frozen.

"The Man I Killed"

100
Straps a claymore mine to a puppy

Azar

100
"No sweat. The magic doesn't go away"

Henry Dobbins

100

Tim O'Brien thought he wouldn't be drafted in part because he had plans for graduate studies here (until deferments for graduate studies ended)

Harvard

200
"I can still see the sunlight on Lemon's face...his face suddenly brown and shining...how the sun seemed to gather around him and lift him high into a tree" (80)

Visual imagery

200

The narrator lists gear, introduces characters, and relates the death of Ted Lavender

"The Things They Carried"

200
Stole Dave Jensen's Jackknife, carried a slingshot.

Lee Strunk

200

"It's bad news, you don't mess with churches"

Kiowa

200

In the final moments of the text, Timmy is doing this with Linda and it becomes a metaphor for both writing and his own processing of his trauma

Ice skating

300

"On his tenth turn around the lake he passed the hiking boys for the last time. The man in the stalled motorboat was gone; the mud hens were gone" (146)

metaphor, repeated image (repetition alone is not enough)

300

Rat Kiley develops immense paranoia and eventually shoots himself in the foot because he can't cope any longer with patrolling in the dark (among other things)

"Night Life"

300

Tells the story about six guys on silent patrol who hear music and eventually hallucinate a cocktail party

Mitchell Sanders

300
"Make me out to be a good guy, okay? Brave and handsome, all that stuff. Best platoon leader ever."

Jimmy Cross

300

This attack ...erm, "attack" of summer 1964 sparked the further involvement of the US in the war.

Gulf of Tonkin indicent

400
"Like some outlandish sporting event: everybody screaming from the sidelines...Abraham Lincoln and Saint George and a nine-year-old-girl named Linda...Huck Finn, and Abbie Hoffmann" (55-56)

allusion (pop culture, historical, personal) (dreamlike imagery i guess maybe)

400

Two monks clean and oil Henry Dobbins's machine gun.

"Church"

400

Imports his girlfriend to the war and then loses her to the Green Berets (and eventually to the woods)

Mark Fossie

400

About war: "You're weird...Some dumb thing happens a long time ago and you can't ever forget it."

Kathleen O'Brien

400

Mary Anne Bell wanted to "_____ this place, the whole country--the dirt the death"

EAT (swallow it whole)

500
"What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things i never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God" (172)

Metafiction

500

Norman Bowker struggles with having returned home from the war

"Speaking of Courage"

500

Tacks $200 to Tim's door marked "Emergency Fund" before taking him on a fishing trip.

Elroy Berdahl

500

"Once you're alive, you can't ever be dead"

Linda

500

This is the name of the river that's both in a story title and features often in the text

Song Tra Bong