Time of Luck: The Random Nature of Survival in O'Brien's Text Tim O'Brien 10th Grade

In the novel The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien demonstrates many ideas about war, survival, corruption, and powerlessness through his collection of short stories. Throughout his book, O’Brien describes many incidents that happen merely because of chance and luck. In these short stories, O’Brien teaches that it is impossible to generalize about war. In a dark irony, war is awful but is not always awful because war corrupts soldiers, but at the same time makes the soldiers feel alive. One central idea that O’Brien writes about that soldiers are powerless over their own survival in the face of war, and that the fate of a soldier is down to chance and luck.

This theme of survival based on luck is shown several times throughout the novel, in instances where a soldier’s survival was purely dependent on chance and luck. In one particular story, O'Brien writes about a soldier who never was injured: “Dobbins was invulnerable. Never wounded, never a scratch. In August, he tripped a Bouncing Betty [a landmine], which failed to detonate. A week later he got caught in the open during a fierce little firefight, no cover at all, he just breathed deep and let the magic do its work” (O’Brien 112). O’Brien writes about a soldier named...