Who is azar in the things they carried

His sympathies, however, are not with the boy, but with the soldier who failed to kill him and instead only succeeded in maiming him. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo. Many of the stories in The Things They Carried are barely stories at all , lacking a narratively clear beginning, middle, and end. Rather, they are memory fragments. Or when Ted Lavender adopted a stray puppy. But of course, there are also stories of bloodshed and near-sadistic cruelty.

Or when the same Azar mocked the frenzied dancing of a girl whose family had just been killed in a napalm attack on her village the girl was clearly suffering from some sort of psychotic break. For some of the men, these were rituals that objectified the horror of war and made it seem less personal—it was easier to cope if it was all just a joke. Others, like Azar, seemed to genuinely relish the most ghoulish aspects of Vietnam and took pleasure in watching the pain and suffering of others.

Finding the body causes the men to reflect on the random nature of life and death in Vietnam. What happened to Kiowa could just as easily have happened to any of them. He brooded over this and yearned to exact revenge on Jorgenson.

He was now capable of evil. All of the potential horrors of war could be projected onto the blackness of the night. View the Lesson Plans. Northern Lights. The Nuclear Age. Tomcat in Love. This student essay consists of approximately 3 pages of analysis of The Things They Carried.

Print Word PDF. This section contains words approx. Although Mary Anne arrives in Vietnam full of innocence, she gains a respect for death and the darkness of the jungle and, according to legend, disappears there. Read an in-depth analysis of Mary Anne Bell. He is a perfect example of the incongruities in Vietnam. Though levelheaded and kind, Kiley eventually succumbs to the stresses of the war and his role in it—he purposely blows off his toe so that he is forced to leave his post.

A childish and careless member of the Alpha Company who is killed when he steps on a rigged mortar round. The preventability of his death and the irrational fears of his life—as when a dentist visits the company—point to the immaturity of many young American soldiers in Vietnam. A young, scared soldier in the Alpha Company. Lavender is the first to die in the work.

He makes only a brief appearance in the narrative, popping tranquilizers to calm himself while the company is outside Than Khe. Another soldier in the platoon and a minor character. In begging Jensen to forget their pact—that if either man is gravely injured, the other will kill him swiftly—after he is injured, he illustrates how the fantasy of war differs from its reality.

A minor character whose guilt over his injury of Lee Strunk causes him to break his own nose. Instead of mourning the loss of his friend, Jensen is glad to know that the pact the two made—and that he broke—has now become obsolete. A soldier in the Alpha Company and one of the few unsympathetic characters in the work. Every time Azar appears, he is mean-spirited and cruel, torturing Vietnamese civilians and poking fun both at the corpses of the enemy and the deaths of his own fellow soldiers.

This moment of remorse proves that a breaking point is possible even for soldiers who use cruelty as a defense mechanism. The medic who replaces Rat Kiley. Frustrated that he cannot tell her the whole truth, he is inspired by her presence since it forces him to gain new perspective on his war experience.