He keeps to himself as he blames the incident on only himself. Nonetheless, Jimmy Cross is ill-equipped to lead. Jimmy Cross carries two of Martha. . He fails to recognize, however, how love and war are connected, relying instead on his love for Martha as an escape from war. He would shut down the daydreams.
The Things They Carried shows the superstitious beliefs among the soldiers through the things that each individual carries. It's hard to say whether or not we're supposed to think Jimmy Cross is being unreasonable here. It shows that in times of war, how callous men can become. He cries for Lavender but also for Martha, because she belongs to another world, and she doesn't love him. She is kind to him, but she does not love him, and she never gets married. The items that bring hope and ambition to soldiers are in fact what weigh them down.
He knows that he should pay attention, but he cannot seem to shake the fantasies of Martha. He steps on a mine one day when they are playing catch together. On the one hand, it's our automatic response to reassure him and say that just loving Martha couldn't possibly have caused Lavender's death. There are so many iffy spots that leave us to develop our own thoughts and feelings toward the piece of work. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. By loving, therefore, he actively resists his duty as a leader — he withdraws from leadership and Vietnam. He believes that bugs are trying to kill him.
During a mission to destroy some tunnels, Cross imagines the tunnel collapsing on him and Martha. Whether it's the way Jimmy Cross uses the pebble to escape from his duties as a soldier. Movies of the time period are great, but they are not able to elicit, seeing the extremely limited time crunch, the same images and charge… 1284 Words 6 Pages commissioning extensive murals by well-known artists. The first story is told in third person, with some insight into the mind of Jimmy Cross. Jimmy Cross also blames himself for Kiowa's death and the grisly effort required to retrieve his body. She crossed her arms at her chest, as if suddenly cold, rocking slightly, then after a time she looked at him and said she was glad he hadn't tried it. All the way to Norman Bowker finally realizing that courage comes from within, not.
He often gets angry when other soldiers tell stories too slowly, or with too much detail. All we know about Ted Lavender when he was alive was that he was scared and he carried marijuana with him. Setting the photographs on fire strikes him as a futile gesture. Even after burning them, he could still imagine Martha and he still remembers what was in the letters. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. He's on his way back from peeing.
Cross was too obsessed with Martha to focus on his main responsibility. This distraction and incompetence of himself lead to the death of one of their fellow soldiers, Ted Lavender. Minor Characters Martha: The girl that Jimmy Cross loves. The men, who all like him, understand that he is not a coward, and they wish him well. She has become part of the jungle, and is lost to him. While I was reading this book one question that kept running through my mind was in regard to the depth of information about the physical weights of the soldiers' items.
The name Lavender is given to him to make him seem like a more feminine character as well. Lee Strunk carries a slingshot, Mitchell Sanders carries brass knuckles, and Kiowa carries his grandfather's hatchet. For an hour or two every Thursday, when Jalil came to see her, all smiles and gifts and endearments, Mariam felt deserving of all the beauty and bounty that life had to give. As Ted Lavender dies, Tim shows several signs of grief, and changes his lifestyle in an attempt to ameliorate the damage. All carry basic military goods and personal items: provisions, ammunition, and special ponchos that they may be wrapped in if they die.
The writer of The Things They Carried is also, of course, named Tim O'Brien, and there are other similarities between the author and the narrator. They all differ in age and ethnicity, and have different views on the Vietnam War. He feels entirely responsible for the death of his subordinate, Ted Lavender, because his focus was on Martha and her pictures, rather than the safety of his men. They draw numbers to see who has to do it. While these men carry the same standard physical army gear, they differentiate with personal tangible and intangible items.