Lieutenant Jimmy Cross in The Things They Carried Essay Sample

By utilizing repetition and retrospection, O’Brien humanizes Lieutenant Jimmy Cross by revealing his feelings of guilt and self-blame for Kiowa’s death while revealing to the audience their similarities. Repetition, wielded to provide examples on whom one could blame for Kiowa’s death, reveals to the audience various sources that Lieutenant Cross could blame, while presenting that he, despite the detached prompters, blames primarily himself. Retrospection, wielded to present how Cross became a lieutenant, communicates to the audience that neither Lieutenant Cross nor O’Brien wanted to partake in the war, and that O’Brien could be utilizing Cross to project his own point-of-view, unbeknownst to readers, while remaining detached physically from the novel and readers.

Cross, like O'Brien, did not want to take part in the war. O’Brien notes, “Jimmy Cross did not want the responsibility of leading these men. He had never wanted it… Military matters meant nothing to him, He did not care one way or the other about the war and he had no desire to command…” to affirm this notion. The two had lives before the war that they desperately wanted to return to. Lieutenant Cross, in an attempt to courageously take control of his life, signed up for the reserve because he would prefer going consensually as opposed to being taken by the draft. O’Brien, on the other hand, debated fleeing the country and thus the war, which could be noted as a cause of Lieutenant Cross’s character, to conjure a more courageous O’Brien.

Lieutenant Cross, like the other soldiers, was pushed into the war in a fit of cowardice. More specifically, “[Cross] had signed up for the Reserve Officer Training Corps… because his friends joined, because it was worth a few credits, and because it seemed preferable to letting the draft take him.” Despite the majority of the soldiers finding distaste in war, they were too afraid not to fight, to flee. Cross signed up primarily because his friends signed up. The notion that this is the predominant reason can be affirmed by this reason being present first. The last reason given, that joining consensually seemed more favorable than being taken, can be noted as a final driving point, where he scoops up his courage and takes it across the world and away from his freedom.

Lieutenant Cross is humanized by his guilt and self-blame. His lengthy reflections on how things could have occurred differently reveals to readers that he truly did want things to occur differently.  O’Brien includes, “What he should’ve done, he told himself, was follow his first impulse… A stupid mistake. That’s all it was, a mistake, but it had killed Kiowa… ” Lieutenant Cross decides that he should have been more knowledgeable, being that he was the leader. He should not have allowed one of the men he was responsible for to die. “When a man died there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war. You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it… In the field, though, the causes were immediate. A moment of carelessness or bad judgment or plain stupidity that lasted forever.” Lieutenant Cross introspectively notes all of the detached outside sources who could be to blame, and to a certain extent, blames them, although he predominantly blames himself, because most of the other sources of blame resided in a completely different world, where they did not know the happenings of the war. The rest of the world could sleep at night being reassured that they were too far away to cause great effects on the war, although the lieutenant was not. The lieutenant could not.