Throughout the entire story of Speaking of Courage, Norman Bowker is driving around and seeing and thinking of people, and has a conversation in his mind with each person about his time at war. It seems that he is wanting to tell everything on his mind just to get it out of his mind and to get some closure from the intense and horrific experience of war. These people have no idea of what war was really like. There are two types of lives that can be lived during war. One being living in the war and fighting/seeing it first hand. The other being living in the war via television and radio. Bowker thinks deeply about what he would say to each person he thinks of about his time and experience at war. It is almost as if he is desperate for either to tell someone, or for someone to ask him about it. However, in this desperate need to tell someone, when he has the opportunity to tell a person working in a restaurant, he doesn’t. It is almost as if he has an epiphany about himself and the war. This represents the loss of innocence and burdens of war. If he really wanted to tell, he could have, yet he doesn’t. This is because he does not want to burden them with the images and feelings he had seen and felt during war. While he thinks about what he would tell people, he goes into great detail, and that is what he wants to keep from these people. Throughout The Things They Carried, there is this idea that ignorance is innocence in the sense that if people don’t know how horrible the war really is, and that they don’t have to experience it, then they still have some innocence in them.
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