Why Does Who Is Remembered, and How, Matter So Deeply?

Everyone is the person they are today because of their past. The paramount events that happen in people's lives drastically affect who he or she is today. Everyone carries an emotional burden of something that has happened in the past, and most likely it deals with another individual. In Tim O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried, carrying emotional burdens is one of the central themes of the novel; most of these burdens are caused by the remembrance of other people.

In the episode, "In the Field," all of the men are mourning Kiowa's death. They all feel a sense of guilt and sadness. They will forever carry the memories associated with Kiowa, and the burden of his death will follow them for years to come. Many years after the war, O'Brien goes with his daughter back to the field in Vietnam where Kiowa was killed. O'Brien was trying to find closure for the death of Kiowa. "I looked for signs of forgiveness or personal grace or whatever else the land might offer,"(O'Brien 173). Tim needed to find this closure because he cared about Kiowa so deeply and thought so highly of him, that it was so difficult for him to cope with the grief. Tim O'Brien, and the other men, remember Kiowa as an honest man with a kind heart, and all of the good memories of him helping the other men deal with their regret and sadness over different situations make coping with his death so difficult. If they had more negative memories associated with Kiowa, it would not have been as difficult for them to deal with his death. This proves that the more positively one remembers another individual, the more pain and sorrow will be present when that person is no longer in his or her life.