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Dodging The Draft In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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Dodging the Draft Tim O’Brien’s famous novel The Things They Carried really starts when Tim, a recent college graduate with a full scholarship to Harvard, gets a draft notice for the Vietnam War. Throughout chapter four “The Rainy River” Tim ingeniously uses language to describe his pain, flashbacks of his younger self and vivid detail of the setting around him to dramatize his dilemma of either to flee to Canada or stay and fight in the war. In Tim O’Brien’s man versus self-conflict he exaggerates his predicament on the Rainy River with language by describing his physical and emotional pain. For example, on lines nineteen through twenty-two Tim and Elroy have just crossed into Canadian waters when Tim acquires a “sudden tightness” in his …show more content…

While on the river Tim describes the atmosphere as an “unpeopled rawness” being it just himself and Elroy. Tim describes the setting as peaceful, and the air brittle, but as the two of them cross into Canada he starts paying more attention to detail, trying to overwhelm the reader with long paragraphs of unnecessary detail, like squirrels and berry bushes. Things that O’Brien had not minded before started to make him uneasy. The feeling of the boat, the waves, air, and silence figuratively drowned him with emotions and pain to help dramatize the uneasy state he is in during the chapter of this book. O’Brien speaks of the wind and waves symbolizing the turmoil and chaos arising in his life and within himself. Tim then goes into immense detail and repetition of how close the Canada shoreline, only a measly twenty yards, is. Tim contemplates jumping from the boat and swimming to the shore that’s only twenty yards away but then decides to, in his opinion, cower and go to war for this country. The way Tim O’Brien goes from describing a relaxed silent environment to becoming extremely uncomfortable to the things that only a couple seconds ago had not bothered him, stresses the language he used to overstate his

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Pg 178. At this lodge he met an older gentlemen named Elroy Berdahl, Tim had spent a total of 6 days at this lodge, where he learnt a lot about himself, Throughout the stay, Elroy never asked much about Tim; where he had come from, what he was running from, anything about his family. On the last day, Elroy had taken him out to go ‘’fishing’’ where they crossed the Canadian border, here is where Tim lost himself briefly, He thought about jumping and swimming across, He looked for reassurance, thinking ‘’ What would you do, would you jump?’’ He did this in his head but acted like he was talking to a different person. He then visioned his family and how they opposed what he was doing, his friends and future family as well.

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