Ethos Pathos And Logos In The Things They Carried

Tim O’Brien is a writer that, while impressive, can be described as indulgent with his words; going on for pages at a time on one topic and not sparing a single detail. This of course is part of his charm. If you look to the first four pages of “The Man I Killed” in his The Things I Carried, in order to show the obsession, feelings, and shock that can come from killing someone, O’Brien makes use of repetition, tone, and appeal to logos. Firstly, throughout the chapter, the reader is to repeatedly come across descriptions or inferences of the man Tim O’Brien killed. This is to show the obsession that comes from the moment, and how you’ll remain rooted in that moment for a long time trying to make sense of it all. This becomes even clearer as

He wore a gold ring on the third finger of his right hand. His chest was sunken and poorly muscled—a scholar, maybe. His life was now a constellation of possibilities. So, yes, maybe a scholar. And for years, despite his family's poverty, the man I killed would have been determined to continue his education in mathematics. The means for this were arranged, perhaps, through the village liberation cadres, and in 1964 the young man began attending classes at the university in Saigon, where he avoided politics and paid attention to the problems of calculus. He devoted himself to his studies. He spent his nights alone,

O’Brien’s tone throughout the chapter is despondent, unchanging, and infatuated. Where you can truly notice this is in the interruptions of O’Brien’s monologue on the boy, in the contrast. A rather lively and ready Kiowa and Azar seem to be in the background saying, "Oh, man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker," Azar said. "You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like Shredded fuckin' Wheat." "Go away," Kiowa said. "I'm just saying the truth. Like oatmeal." "Go," Kiowa said. "Okay, then, I take it back," Azar said. He started to move away, then stopped and said, "Rice Krispies, you know? On the dead test, this particular individual gets A-plus." Smiling at this, he shrugged and walked up the trail toward the village behind the trees.” Yet when O’Brien’s voice becomes noticeable, it remains monotone and numb because O’Brien is in a state of shock; the event is so stressful and crazed that O’Brien shuts down, only able to function at the bear