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The Things They Carried

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The Things They Carried Curt Lemon Character Analysis

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Characters The Things They Carried Curt Lemon Character Analysis

Curt Lemon is a young soldier in Tim’s platoon. He’s a close friend of Rat Kiley’s, and the two often goof off together, not fully understanding the danger constantly surrounding them. Tim doesn’t much like Curt, finding him performatively masculine and self-aggrandizing, but Curt’s sudden death traumatizes him, nonetheless. Curt steps on a land mine while playing a game with Rat and is blasted into a tree. Tim and Kiowa are ordered to climb the tree to collect his body parts.

Curt’s death serves to introduce one of the collection’s most important themes: the difference between truth and reality. Curt died from stepping on a land mine and being blown into pieces that landed in a nearby tree. But from Tim’s perspective, the death was so sudden and confusing that it simply looked as if Curt stepped into the sunlight, and then floated into the air as if the sun was lifting him up and away. Then, suddenly, he was dead. Tim expresses that it’s vital to describe Curt’s death as it seemed to happen, rather than as it actually happened. In Tim’s eyes, and perhaps in Curt’s as well, it seemed that Curt was killed by the sun. There’s even a sort of beauty and peace in the way his body was lifted into the air. Telling the story of Curt’s death from this perspective heightens the absurdity of the Vietnam experience.