The Things They Carried Characters

There are three important Tim O'Briens in the story: Tim the Soldier, Tim the Writer, and Timmy the Kid. They're all the same person, but it's important for you to keep the three separate, so we'l...

Everyman RatEverybody, and we mean everybody, knows a guy like Rat. First of all, Rat's real name is Bob, but everybody calls him Rat. He's the guy who loves to tell stories, but makes a lot of s...

Kiowa is pretty much the most decent character in the entire book. He's thoughtful, respects the Vietnamese, isn't a coward, and he even has a sense of humor. We quickly learn that he's O'Brien's...

You can't help but feel a little sorry for Jimmy Cross. He's the leader of the platoon, but he's the opposite of the tough, Schwarzenegger or Sam Worthington-type you'd expect of an officer in Vie...

Azar is the guy who kills puppies. Literally. When Ted Lavender adopts a puppy, Azar straps it to a mine, explodes it, and then completely fails to understand why everyone is mad at him. Yeah....

Mitchell Sanders is obsessed with the truth. He's the one who's always trying to figure out what the moral is, whether it's of a story or a corpse lying in the road. He doesn't need the moral to...

We know more about Bowker at peace than we do about him at war. At war, we know that he's gentle, but carries a thumb that Mitchell Sanders cut off a VC soldier and gave to him. The only other pe...

Henry Dobbins is that gentle giant that you see in pretty much any movie or book about a group of people. He's big, so he's the machine gunner of the group, and you'd think that he'd be pretty sca...

Mary Anne is that pretty, fresh-faced girl next door… who turns into a demon from a horror movie. We think she's ultimately more important as a symbol than as a character, but—what the heck—...

Curt Lemon and Ted Lavender are basically the red shirts of the book. What, you never saw Star Trek? Fine: They're marked for death from their very first mention. Ted Lavender is our very first...

This is another pair of slightly less important soldiers. In terms of the story, they really only matter when they're with each other, and otherwise, the two are your average pair of cocky young m...

Jorgenson is one of those surprise characters—we start out hating him, and then wham! All of a sudden we both like and respect him. Well, then.He replaces Rat as the team's medic, so automatica...

All of the civilian characters—Kathleen, Martha, Bowker's father, Sally Gustafson—are important mainly in that they can't possibly understand what the soldiers are going through. They misunders...

Elroy is a pretty mysterious old guy. He is right there when O'Brien needs him, and he lets O'Brien make his own decision about whether to go to Vietnam or run to Canada without judging him or pus...

Fossie is just not too bright, we're sorry to say. He's so lovesick that he brings his childhood sweetheart over to Vietnam, and when she starts to change (as people do when they enter a war zone)...

Despite the fact that we know absolutely nothing about the young man's life beyond his physical description and the place that he dies, he still plays an essential role in the book, one that you sh...