Irony In The Things They Carried

Irony typically serves to create a humorous relief from the seriousness of a story or to evoke feelings of empathy in a reader. Tim O’Brien creates a novel chock full of irony that functions tocreate the latter. The Things They Carried contains irony all the way through the book, from the title to the ultimate sentence of the book. One of the greatest pieces of irony that serves throughout thewhole book comes from Mitchell Sanders, when he says that if they want a moral, “there it is” (O’Brien 13). O’Brien uses the irony in the moral of “there it is” to express the effects of the war.
Themoral first comes from the mouth of Mitchell Sanders while they examine the VC corpse of a “boy of fifteen or sixteen” (12). It angers Henry Dobbins off, in fact, when he “[doesn’t] see no moral”(13), which Sanders justifies as the moral. But the moral Sanders observes makes sense, because what fifteen or sixteen year old boy knows what war constitutes, or even what reasons he fights for.Absolutely nothing makes sense about young boys dying for causes they lack understanding of. The boys in O’Brien’s platoon, young and fresh, barely over out of their parent’s nest, “the average age…nineteen or twenty” (35), lack knowledge of the world and of life. Sending off these young innocent boys to fight a war lacking “reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause” (39), had nopoint, which defines Mitchell Sanders’s moral. O’Brien uses ironic moral to show that the Vietnam War in particular, serves no purpose if the soldiers waste away fighting for a purposeless cause.Mitchell Sanders’s ironic moral comes back in his story of the mountains with the “crazyass gook concert” (70). The story displays how true war stories “never [seem] to end” (72). The story alsoelucidates the moral of “there it is.” In Sanders’s story, he talks about a patrol group that gets sent into the mountains on a listening-post operation and hears the strangest things ever, including...