Get Character Chart For The Things They Carried

What does Ted Lavender symbolize? Ted Lavender symbolizes the fears and anxieties the soldiers felt during the Vietnam War. He struggles to cope with the situations surrounding them and uses marijuana and tranquilizers to cope.

Rather than forgetting his past, O'Brien confronts and re-confronts the various traumas of his life to resolve some of the elements of chaos he still feels thirty years later. He seeks not an end, but a resolution, and not through denial, but through memory.

In offering more details about Martha — that she became a Lutheran missionary, that she had never married, that she did not know why she had not — including her remark about how men do "those things," the author subtly reveals that Martha had been the victim of rape.

The character of Rat Kiley changed the most in The Things They Carried. He is first characterized as skilled, brave, and competent as a medic by O'Brien but a bad storyteller as he is an unreliable narrator who is...

The medic Rat Kiley has a mental breakdown. At first he becomes silent and then begins to talk nonstop about the bugs in Vietnam being out to get him while digging at his own skin. Having seen too much war and too many wounded bodies, he also can't stop imagining how living people would look if they were dead.

While Ted Lavender's rank is not specifically stated in The Things They Carried, the author does say that most of the soldiers in Alpha Company had the rank PFC, which is Private First Class. This is only two ranks above the lowest enlisted rank in the U.S. Army.

Ultimately, Mary Ann symbolizes a common phenomenon for Americans fighting in any war - the transformation from innocence to savage experience. She arrives as a person happily conforming to the norms of society and ends up more like an animal, living without regard to custom or appearance.