While the color purple has hundreds of different shades, all of them looking similar, many of them can have completely different meanings. Color can show emotion, symbolism, and even sound. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the color purple shows time passing, symbolism through a military award, and in the middle of a crisis, peace. Tim O'Brien uses color in key parts of the story in order to allow the reader to envision the scene that he is trying to retell, or capture, one of the first times he does this is when he explains the day changing.
Through time, day after day the sun rises and sets, starting at a light pink then fading to a deep purple. Purple shows the ending of the day, the final hours of sunlight until the night turns…show more content… When the sun sets it turns many different colors. The most prominent of the colors that the sky turns is purple. As the soldiers fight, every single night for their deployment they can look up and see purple, giving them confidence because they have lived through another day at war. While at war, occasionally soldiers are given a day to rest, during these types of days, Norman Bowker and Henry Dobbins, “would dig a foxhole and get the board out and play long silent games as the sky went from pink to purple.” (O’Brien, 41). In order to kill time, or relieve themselves from stress, Bowker and Dobbins would play an endless amount of checkers, until they would look to the sky and see purple. Purple in the sky can also be a sign of not just the day coming to an end but also a symbol of years passing, one example of this is when Norman Bowker drives round and round the lake in the center of his hometown, he thinks of his high school sweetheart, Sally Gustafson. He then remembers while he was at war he missed all of that time, the time when people began to hunker down and get married, start their careers after high school or…show more content… Medals are almost always associated with color, in the same category there is the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, and the Silver Star. When Bowker describes his feelings about the Purple Heart, he always wishes that he had done better and won the Silver Star. Bowker always affiliates the color purple with not being good enough. He does this when he talks about his awards to his father, when talking about his Purple Heart he says, ““if it hadn’t been for that smell, I could’ve won the Silver Star.”” (O’Brien, 168). He means that if the smell in the field had not been so terrible, he could have saved Kiowa, earning himself the Silver Star and saving Kiowa’s life. However, Bowker could not save Kiowa because of the smell so whenever he thinks of purple, his mind wanders to the Purple Heart, which was not good enough for him, so the color purple reminds him of what he could have won, instead of what he actually won. Also while acting out the conversation with his dad in his imagination, ““Norman Bowker might have listed the seven medals he did win; the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, the Air Medal, the Army Commendation Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, the Vietnam Campaign Medal, the Bronze Star, and the
