The Lives Of The Dead By Tim O Brien: Summary

The Forgotten Dead takes in an account in US History that the problem of lynching did not only occurred in the US Southern states with African-Americans, but it also occurred in the US southwest with the Mexican-Americans.

In the story "The Dead", Gabriel describes his wife as a beautiful woman whose time has run out both physically and emotionally. James Joyce proves metaphors and imagery to be essential when attempting to engage a reader into a story. He further shows how it can make a story all the more meaningful.

    In his short story The Dead, James Joyce creates a strong contrast between Gabriel, who is emotionally lifeless, and the other guests, who are physically aging and near death. Though physical mortality is inevitable, Joyce shows that emotional sterility is not, and Gabriel ultimately realizes this and decides that he must follow his passions. Throughout the story, a strong focus on death and mortality, a focus that serves as a constant reminder of our inevitable end of physical life, is prevalent in Joyce's selection of details. In the story, the unconquerable death ultimately triumphs over life, but it brings a triumph for the central character, not a loss. Despite the presence of death, the

O’Brien was confused about death when his girlfriend died, he felt so strongly for her even at a young age. He would daydream about her and this kept her alive in his mind. He realized that storytelling and imagination could keep the dead alive. The way he deals with her death helps him to deal with death during Vietnam and later the stories help him to deal with the difficulties he’s had in life.

“Forgotten Dead” by authors William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, delivered a collective narration of the numerous lynching crimes against Mexican people in the southern west states of the United States. Their purpose was to describe that extend of mob violations against the minority groups of people in the United States. By, arguing how many of these racial crimes were prejudice to eliminate the potential competition for territory, and gold mines’ economy that were potentially able to provide the envy position that Anglo people were afraid to loose. They wanted to figure out, who these forgotten dead Mexicans were at the time, and what types of “crimes” they committed to face such cruelty death in the hands of the mob Anglo groups. They uncovered the grand extend of violent scenes that Anglo vigilantes members of mob groups organized the banishment of many Mexican in what they had considered part of their territory at the time.

Many authors use storytelling as a vehicle to convey the immortality of past selves and those who have passed to not only in their piece of literature but in their life as an author. In Tim O’Brien’s work of fiction The Things They Carried, through his final chapter “The Lives of the Dead,” O 'Brien conveys that writing is a matter of survival since, the powers of storytelling can ensure the immortality of all those who were significant in his life. Through their immortality, O’Brien has the ability to save himself with a simple story. Through snippets of main plot event of other chapters, O’Brien speaks to the fact the dead have not actually left; they are gone physically, but not spiritually or emotionally. They live on in memories as Linda lives on in the memories of O’Brien and as many of his war buddies live on through his stories. He can revive them and bring them back to the world through his writings and through these emotions or events he experienced with them and with their deaths can make them immortal. Through the reminiscent stories of Linda and O’Brien’s war companions and himself, O’Brien conveys that storytelling allows people to reanimate others who have died and past selves to create an immortality of humans.

In “Lives of the Dead”, O’Brien’s own innocence is preserved through the memory of Linda, a memory that remains untarnished by the inevitable corruption that results from life. O’Brien’s writings “save Linda’s life. Not her body--her life” (236). Storytelling and memories preserve the value of Linda’s existence while simultaneously allowing O’Brien to process death and destruction in a way that maintains a degree of optimism regarding his own life and future. Juxtaposing the images of body and life emphasizes his desire to save the idea of Linda while accepting the loss of her physical presence. O’Brien rejects the idea of death as absolute and final; instead he suggests that “once you are alive, you can never be dead” (244). Linda’s death solidifies her importance in O’Brien’s own development; she teaches him about life and real love as much as in death as in life. O’Brien’s paradoxical statement defines the lasting impact of Linda on him; her presence in his stories keeps her alive through memory; memories that even her death

Writing stories helped O'Brien during the war. They helped him get through the painful and unknown experience that he was not used to before the war. O'Brien says during the war, he picked up multiple bodies and “lifted and dumped [them] into a truck”, but with the stories he made “ the dead sometimes smile

This summer, I read the book The Dead by Charlie Higson is a novel about a large group of kids, left to live by themselves without guidance from their parents. In this run-down setting of London, England, people who are over the age of 16 turn into kid hunting, flesh-eating zombies. The younger kids are forced to live on their own, fighting for life against the wrath of the Adults. The message Higson showed in his book is: after people are forced to rely on themselves without experience, their lack of experience and knowledge will lead them to failure.

Drawing upon the ability of fiction to preserve life against death, O 'Brien says that, during wartime, that they were able to "[keep] the dead alive with stories" (239). To the living, stories were a way to keep the memory of the dead alive, but to the dead, it was the simple act of remembering that kept them alive: "That 's what a story does. The bodies are animated. You make the dead talk" (232). This theme of preservation is exemplified by story of Linda, in which O 'Brien uses the power of storytelling and memory to keep people alive: "Stories can save us. I 'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive...They 're all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world." (225).

In the novella The Body, author Stephen King makes an attempt to explain a story about losing innocence, only to be replaced by maturity and the corruption that comes with it. To do so, King revolves a story around a group of four boys who go on a life changing journey to find a dead body they heard about through the grape vine. Little did they know that pursuing this journey would eventually change them for the worse. In its entirety, the crux of the novella was to show how the experience of meeting death hands-on will pivot a person’s life and will either lead them onto a slippery slope or mold them in to a man soon to be. More specifically, King reinforces this theme beautifully by using light imagery during the

The story about Timmy and Linda is so important because it represents the way storytelling and memory can alleviate the pain in any traumatic situation. "Lying in bed at night, I made up elaborate stories to bring Linda alive in my sleep."(O'Brien pg. 230). Timmy was the younger version of the new Tim, even when Linda first died he used stories to keep her alive. This was the first incident in his life that we know of where O'Brien references Storytelling to keep the dead alive. This can help us to understand why Tim O’Brien wrote this book, telling us all of his stories from war. Each of the stories he tells is a way to relieve his pain from war. In the worksheet over “Death”, I was asked what is meant by stories save people. What is meant

Medieval China, as seen in the Stories from a Ming Collection, was characterized by distinct separations between men and women’s abilities, typical old fashioned family structure, and a desire to advance their social status. Throughout all the stories in this book, it dives deep into different aspects of how men and women are treated, how families were structured and how that affects their lives, as well as the values these people held. A very common trend in the stories was how different men and women were treated and the limitations they may or may not had.

Once there was a woman who told a story. However, she had more than just an entertaining tale to tell. She chose common images that everyone would understand, and she wrapped her story around them, and in this way she was able to teach the people . . .

The story also represents spiritual death. The spiritual death is not as prevalent in the story as the