Volar and The Things They Carried

" Step by step I would fill out: My legs would grow long, my arms harden into steel, and my hair would magically go straight and turn a golden color."

1) To me, vivid means that something is very descriptive and you can imagine being there, knowing exactly where you are, due to the description. I chose the passage above as being very vivid because I can see the narrator's dream and see her change completely into Supergirl.

2) The author changes because in the beginning it seems like she is very childish and does not understand what her parents are going through. But towards the end she notices that her parents are going through a hard time financially. She allows them their 45 minutes of peace in the morning before her mother wakes her up, even if she is awake already. She realizes that her mother dreams too, but her dreams cannot come true due to financial difficulty. The author then realizes that things in life don't come true all of the time.

3) In The Things They Carried, the object that stood out the most to me were the tranquilizers that Ted Lavender carried around. The tranquilizers stood out to me because I know that if I was in Vietnam during that vicious time, I would want to be in my own world too. Ted Lavender used the tranquilizers because he was scared of being in the Vietnam War, and in the end the tranquilizers helped Ted out. When Ted Lavender got shot, he never felt a thing. He didn't feel any pain because he had taken about two tranquilizers right before he got shot and also because he got shot in the head. I think he took the tranquilizers because they hid the fact that being in the Vietnam War was a scary situation.