When Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried was published, it was heavily dissected and broken down into numerous themes. While there are many themes illustrated throughout the book, the emotional burdens each soldier carries, and how they cope with and overcome these burdens is the most prominent theme. O’Brien puts the reader on the ground with those soldiers in Vietnam, and the reader can feel the emotional pain that each of the soldiers are carrying, and see how they are coping with that pain. This book shows how one endures and overcomes the pain/obstacles they are dealing with. In 1994, Frank Darabont wrote and directed a film depicting the obstacles one must overcome to achieve one’s goal. A film named The Shawshank Redemption showed the struggle of a man trying cope with living in prison while claiming his innocence. Both the book and the film share the similar theme of coping and overcoming obstacles that sand in your way. These texts are timeless, no matter when you read or watch either one of them, the message will always be the same. No matter what you have going against you, no matter how bad it hurts emotionally or physically, you can overcome it. You can deal with anything life throws at you, whether its patrolling through Vietnam or being thrown in jail for a crime you didn’t commit, you can overcome it.

Communicating the struggle one is faced with at war or in prison is a very hard task to accomplish, but both Tim O’Brien and Frank Darabout do an excellent job of putting the reader/viewer in the shoes of the characters, so that one may see the burdens the characters are dealing with. In The Things They Carried, O’Brien first describes in detail the weight of every object the soldiers are carrying with them throughout Vietnam. This lets the reader understand the physical amount of weight and pressure the soldiers are under. He then diverges from the physical burden of the soldiers to describing the emotional and psychological burden of the soldiers. He says, “They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity” (The Things 39). This metaphor O’Brien creates as to what the soldiers are carrying shows not only the physical burdens of the soldiers, but the emotional and psychological burdens as well as the soldiers feel as if they are literally carrying the landscape with them. By immediately sharing the burdens of the soldiers with the readers, O’Brien invites them along on this journey with the characters as they receive, endure, and overcome these burdens (Vernon). Darabout also allows the viewers to understand the emotional burdens the inmates of the prison feel. When talking about the prison, one of the characters, Red, says, “They send you here for life, and that's just what they take” (Darabout). This gives the reader a personal account as to what an inmate feels about the prison. The reader connects to the characters on a much deeper level, by almost experiencing the situation for themselves. It also shows how the inmates feel such an emotional and physiological burden that they do not consider themselves to have their own life while they’re in prison. Through these examples, it is clear how both O’Brien and Darabout do an excellent job of placing the reader in the shoes of the characters so that they can feel the same amount of emotional duress these characters are feeling.

In both stories, characters are placed in harsh situations where it would be easy to give up and accept reality, but these characters make the most of their situations and find ways to cope with their harsh surroundings. Inspiring the reader/viewer to do the same. In The Things They Carried, the soldiers found ways to make their environment and situation appear more serene than it actually was. To do this, they would take part in simple activities that calmed them down and made them forget the horror of the war around them. For example, every night Norman Bowker and Henry Dobbins sit in a foxhole and play checkers. This way, they could make the war seem “sweeter” than it actually was, as O’Brien says, “The war wasn't all terror and violence. Sometimes things could get almost sweet…you could put a fancy spin on it, you could make it dance” (The Things 31). Playing checkers was just one way two of the soldiers put a “spin” on the war, which made the process of coping and surviving through it easier. In Shawshank redemption, Andy also finds ways to make his life in the prison easier. Andy is very clever and knows how to pull strings to make his life a little easier, as “he uses his knowledge of investment strategies and tax shelters to integrate himself with the head guard and the warden...Dufresne’s shrewdness gains him one concession after another: out-of-door work and free beer for his buddies, protection from a gang of rapists, the post of assistant librarian, and, finally, permission to start a prison tutorial program” (Richard). This shows how even in a prison for a crime he didn’t commit, Andy can cope with his emotional burdens as he finds ways to make prison life more enjoyable. Even though there are endless emotional burdens in both war and prison, the characters in both The Things They Carried and The Shawshank Redemption, share of common theme of the characters enduring these burdens and doing what little they can to make them seem less severe.

Although these characters have extreme amounts of emotional burdens and hardships, the common theme in both works is that they don’t give up and they overcome their obstacles. Many people cope with painful situations such as war in different ways, but the one that works for the characters in The Things They Carried and the author himself is storytelling. Through storytelling, the soldiers can take their experiences from war, and make them into they want they want them to be. This was repeated many times over in the book as, The Things They Carried repeatedly attests to the power of storytelling to transform events and to affirm a new kind of truth, one more spiritual than factual, while somehow in the process redeeming us and resurrecting the dead” (Vernon). Storytelling allows readers to receive a more accurate description of what it was like to be in war, since the author can create a story that allows the reader to feel exactly as they felt. Tim O’Brien’s whole book is an example of this as it is fiction, but based off his experiences in the war. In the book itself many characters create stories that are obviously fabricated, but imagining an ideal story or situation helps them to heal and cope with the hardships of war, and it creates a more accurate description of what it was like to go through these terrifying events. In The Shawshank Redemption, there is also a theme of not giving up and persevering as Andy keeps trying to get out of prison, and finally does so. Even after Andy and Red are free, Red still has hope to find Andy when he says,                                                               “I find I'm so excited that I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it's the excitement only a free man can feel. A free man at a start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.” (Darabout)                                                                                                                                                 This shows the theme of Shawshank redemption as Red keeps persevering and will not give up on finding his friend. Also, Andy and Red are faced with many obstacles and burdens while in jail, but ultimately overcome these obstacles in the end.  

One of the hardest things in life to master is how to receive, endure, and overcome obstacles one may be faced with. Two pieces of media that touch on this topic and share the theme of not giving up and overcoming obstacles is The Things They Carried and The Shawshank Redemption. In The Things They Carried, the soldiers are weighted down with many physical and emotional burdens, and Tim O’Brien puts the readers in these soldiers’ shoes as he describes literally what the weight of these burdens feel like. Readers also gain a sense of the pain of being in prison as a character in Shawshank Redemption admits that it feels as if the prison had taken his life. Characters in both of these works endure these struggles and find ways to lessen the pain as they do things to relieve them of the stress of their environment such as playing checkers or running a library. Eventually, the theme of overcoming one’s obstacles is reached in both of these works as the soldiers find peace through storytelling and the characters in Shawshank Redemption eventually gain their freedom. 