In both Tim O'Brien's “The Things They Carried” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrators are stuck in situations where the cargo emotional takes over psyche. Each protagonist undergoes a mental disjunction from reality. The narrator of "The Things They Carried" recounts firsthand events that occurred during the Vietnam War. O'Brien recounts the various missions his company takes part in, as well as describing the deaths of his teammates. The multiple deaths that occurred during O'Brien's tenure begin to weigh heavily on his mind in his post-war adjustment period as he struggles to adjust to life at home following the death of his best friend. “The Yellow Wallpaper” features a narrator who suffers from nervous depression and cannot. The narrator of "The Things They Carried" deals with the subjective conditions of war. Throughout the story, strained emotions often brought emotion to O'Brien's team, especially after a death, resulting in a "crying Christ" in "grievous pain" (O'Brien 1185). The emotional fury associated with death begins to erode the sharp minds of soldiers and becomes mentally effective. After a major event, it still began to weigh on the protagonist as he often “carried with him all the emotional baggage of men who might die” during the war (O'Brien 1187). The travesties that occurred with the brutality of the war did not subside and began to affect those involved in deeply emotional ways. The multitude of disastrous events influenced the narrator to develop a psychological handicap until his death by being “afraid of dying” while being “even more afraid to show it” (O'Brien 1187). The burden caused by the war creates fear in the protagonist's mind, but if he were to show his sense of anguish it would cause a deeper fear in those around him, thus making the thought of exposing the fear even more frightening. The emotional battle that occurred in the narrator's psyche is directly repressed by the war. The protagonist of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is also faced with the task of coping with mental difficulties. The author of "The Things They Carried" expresses the deep pain and emotionally difficult events associated with war. As the war progressed, the effects began to be felt more and more on the protagonist as "the days would seem longer and [the] burdens heavier" (O'Brien 1190). The use of words like longer and heavier helped the author express how much the war began to take a toll on the soldiers. At one point the author recalls a soldier kicking the head of a dead enemy and wondering "what the moral was" in doing so (O'Brien 1183). This sense of remorse towards the senseless actions that occurred during the war shows the discontent with the events that happen. Instead, the author of “The Yellow Wallpaper” questions the reasoning behind the wallpaper and begins to curiously deduce why it might be in her room. The protagonist deduces that the wallpaper “looks as if a boys' school had used it” and destroyed it because it was “stripped” (Gilman 549). The narrator begins looking for answers from a wall with none, which leaves it to his tainted imagination to guess what the answers might be. Even though the narrator is advised bed rest, she still chooses to "disagree with [her husband's and his brother's] ideas" and to "believe that