How the imagination is used On Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

The Theme Essay :

On Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

Write a 5 page essay double-spaced using Times New Roman font with size 12, and one inch margins on the top, bottom, and both sides. Spacing between paragraphs is to be the standard double spacing, nothing else. A minimum of 4 pages is required to receive a passing grade. No cover page is needed. Only the heading is enough. Do not double-space the bits of information in your headings, which should be in the following format:

Yiming Wu
English 1A
Spring 2016
Dr. Don L. Jobe

The assignment is merely to explain something about how the imagination is used and portrayed in the novel. That something is to be your focus, your controlling idea that allows you to discuss an insightful and profound theme about the imagination. You might come up with something about how the imagination can help or can hinder us humans, or maybe you have good things to say about the imagination being our real faculty of perception. Whatever the case, your thesis is to be a viewpoint, a controlling idea, about the imagination. We will discuss various controlling ideas in class. Remember that your theme will have varying parts or aspects to it. Such an analysis will allow you to display your powers of reason. However, just stay within the novel, how the theme, or concept, is used in the novel, its meanings, uses and relevance. Of course, you will want to discuss specific characters and scenes. Let me provide a list of some concepts, for which we will want to note page numbers:

Garden of Evil Against human nature
Imagination is a killer No abstraction or analysis
Primitive consciousness Courage
The survival instinct Courage and fear, same difference
and its effect on consciousness Absence or Existence of God
The dual structure of the mind The aesthetic purity of absolute
Myth making moral indifference
The redemptive side (or not) of storytelling Idea as existence of God,
Jimmy Cross as human “intercessor” (storytelling)
There-it-is theme Explaining things to an absent judge
The separateness-togetherness theme Happening truth vs. imagined truth,
Blood fraternity Rat’s heating up the truth
People who never listen Superstition, talismans
The search for a moral Ritual uses of tangible objects
A true war story is never moral The use of ritual
Endings Superstition vs. fact
Rules Embarrassment
Burdens Innocence to experience
Memory A Soldier’s heart
The human imagination Writing as therapy

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You are required to use 3 secondary sources taken from the list below this paragraph. Make sure that you have at least 3 from the ones that I provide. Any article that is not supplied by me should be printed out and should accompany your essay with any quoted material underlined or highlighted. Secondary sources are required and excellent to use and interesting because they show you how another person handled the issues (or merely glossed over them). You are required to use a Works Cited page at the end of your essay with a heading and your sources listed in this manner:

Works Cited

The Fog of War. Dir. Errol Morris. DVD. Sony Pictures, 2003.

Herzog, Tobey C. Tim O’Brien. Twayne’s United States Authors Series, No. 691. Ed.
Frank Day. Twayne Publishers: New York, 1997.

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried (TTTC) . Mariner Books edition. New York:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

Smith, Patrick A. Tim O’Brien: A Critical Companion. Critical Companions to Popular
Contemporary Writers. Ed. Kathleen Gregory Klein. Westport, Connecticut:
Greenwood Press, 2005.

“Tim O’Brien.” Contemporary Literary Criticism (LCL). Vol. 103. Ed. Deborah A.
Smith. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998, pp. 130-143, pp. 158-163, pp. 168-177.

For online sources, the general procedure is as follows: Begin with the author, then the title of the piece of writing, then the title of the web site, followed by the name of the editor if possible, then the electronic publication date, which includes, if relevant, the version number, the date of publication, and the name of the sponsoring institution if possible, then the page numbers if possible. End with the date that you used the source and in angle brackets (<>) the source’s complete URL.
In the body of your essay, you typically introduce another author thus: In an interview with Martin Naparsteck, Tim O’Brien claims that “exercising the imagination is the main way of finding truth . . . .” and that “your imagination is going to do things” with “an experience to render it into something that you can deal with and that has meaning to it” (CLC 137). Another method of introducing an authors is thus: According to Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during The Vietnam War, “Belief and seeing are both often wrong” (Fog of War). Another method is to introduce the author by means of a complete sentence ended with a colon this way: Tobey Herzog finds that the soldiers attempt to establish order and control, however temporary, via their imagination: The soldiers escape “into their imagination through daydreams and war stories, which . . . have definite rules for presentation, form, and meaning. Such control gained through these mind games is fleeting, however” (119). Another method is to simply state what the author believes: Patrick Smith believes that, for O’Brien, “The development of his imagination is the beginning of the telling of stories, which also becomes a lifeline, a way of coping with Vietnam” (101).
Notice that I have used the present tenses as if the comment is a current idea even though O’Brien made that comment years ago. Use the present tenses when writing about fictional characters so that you do not end up switching back and forth between the present and past tenses without any specific reason. Note well that fictional characters live and die; they are always living and dying every time you read the book. Using the present tenses will make your writing smoother because every time you offer an interpretative comment, it will be in the present tense just like your references to the characters and scenes. Show time sequences with other words, for example after, before, when, later, now, etc. There are some times when you have to use the various past tenses, but only use them when you must. Note that reading and quoting a critical essay will reveal how a professional uses tenses and introduces quotations, which are kept short, essential, and very pertinent.