2. Whole Class Review Activity

3. Directions: The class will form eight groups, each consisting of four students (class has 32 students enrolled). Each group, appropriately named 1-8, will discuss and create four questions regarding their assigned reading of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. These questions will be submitted to the instructor at the end of the group session. The following class, students will get back into the groups they chose and we will begin playing Wheel of Fortune! When the wheel stops spinning, the group with the corresponding number must then answer one of the other 28 questions created by the seven other groups. Each group will have a chance to answer four questions. The groups who answer all correctly will be awarded two points toward the test grade. The goal of this is to promote open discussion of the text and provide a greater understanding of key concepts that will be assessed.

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6. Q: Other than equipment, what other “things” did the soldiers in the story carry? A: Each soldier carried emotions, memories, love and friendship gained and lost both at home and in Vietnam. They carried wounds of their own, they carried friends because of wounds suffered. They carried fantasies about how home was in their absence.

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9. Q: What unifies the stories in "The Things They Carried?" A: The story is unified by the platoon’s typical actions, the threat of death as focused on Lavender, and the concerns and feelings of Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. The unnamed narrator also furnishes constant understanding of the men and sympathy for the burdens of their wartime tasks. This garners a more relatable story to the many of us who have no experience with war.

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12. Q: What does Sanders say about the thumb? A: At first, Mitchell Sanders is not articulate or expansive in expressing the meaning and moral of the severed thumb. The most he can do is to point to the dead man and say, "There it is, man" (paragraph 37). Dobbins says that there is no moral. Later on (paragraph 75), the men consider the moral further. A reader might wish to contemplate what it means to repeat "there it is" as an "act of poise" and the further meaning of "you can’t change what can’t be changed."

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15. Q: Why is the act of listening so very important in The Things They Carried? A: "Not listening" is a common motif in the novel because O'Brien subverts the rhetorical dynamics between author, text, and audience. The problem is between author and audience, or between speaker and listener. There are listening difficulties between men and women, between veterans and civilians, within a homogeneous group of soldiers, in the pre- war stories, the war stories, and the post-war stories. So, the stories in The Things They Carried, as a whole, are a way to reconstruct the message so that a new, younger generation of listeners can make sense of a senseless war.