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Ethos Pathos And Logos In The Things They Carried

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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 …show more content…

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, …show more content…

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

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“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien falls into the new historism category based on the different forms of discourse. For example, O’Brien often writes about the various soldiers of Alpha company and the various things they carried them in addition to why they carried them. This provides a helpful insight because we are able to see the differences of this squad of men, whether it is their height, build or religious preferences, the things they carry are all a piece of that individuals character. Although this story was produced in 1990 it calls on the experiences of the author and the validity of his experiences.

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“But from this point on he would comport himself as an officer…”. O'Brien repeats these three phrases to emphasize his point. I think the phrases "they carried" and "the things they carried" are stressed continuously in order to really state the fact that war can be burdensome and grueling. These words are thrown at the reader repeatedly because they hold weight.

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679 Words | 3 Pages

The trade of African slaves in the 17th century was perceived as so commonplace that a good deal of the world's population gave it little or no thought. British involvement with slavery became unavoidable at the end of the 17th century, when abolitionist literature gained public attention. The first hand account of life as a slave in Olaudah Equiano's auto-biography was like no other piece of abolitionist literature at the time. The three methods of persuasion in his writing are ethical appealing ethos, logic engaging logos, and his most effective of emotional appealing pathos. Equiano's use of pathos in his auto-biography was effective in persuading the British that slavery is wrong, because of the emotional effects, such as misery, sympathy,

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In the short story, “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien focuses on this to show that everyone fighting in a war has a story. He spends the story describing the man he killed and searching for justification of his actions. He carries around guilt with him because of it, and his fellow soldiers try to help him justify and come to terms with his action by saying things like, “You want to trade places with him? Turn it all upside down= you want that? I mean, be honest,” (126) and “Tim, it’s a war.

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Women has greatly suffered in society from the beginning until now and no one seems to notice this prolonged issue that women have to endure in their daily lives. The media played a major role to how women are perceived in todays society. Nevertheless, in todays world more and more individuals are attempting to address the problem to solve this issue once and for all. Jennifer Newsom effectively convince her audience in an American documentary film: “Miss representation” to embellish the denigration of women in society and persuade the audience through the use of logos, pathos, and explicit visual images.

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The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, illustrates the experiences of a man and his comrades throughout the war in Vietnam. Tim O’Brien actually served in the war, so he had a phenomenal background when it came to telling the true story about the war. In his novel, Tim O’Brien uses imagery to portray every necessary detail about the war and provide the reader with a true depiction of the war in Vietnam. O’Brien starts out the book by describing everything he and his comrades carry around with them during the war. Immediately once the book starts, so does his use of imagery.

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The use of Logos, Pathos and Ethos in writings is a way to persuade the reader, it is away to help the writer have better communication with his audience, mainly in speeches, text, advertisement and many others. Logos appeals to reason based on logic, this involves statistics and facts to help the writer support their claim, which makes it more believable, and it shows the writer has knowledge of the claim they are making which makes the reader believe what the writer is saying is valid and also true. For example if I stated that Taylor Swift was more popular in 2015 than her best friend Selena Gomez was because she had more followers than her and now she is not I should have the statistic to show that so that my audience believe it’s true.

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In the chapter “The Man I Killed” O’Brien killed a man he felt should not have been killed. Kiowa helps O’Brien through it. “I'm serious. Nothing anybody could do. Come on, stop staring” (O’Brien 120).

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This quote epitomizes the trauma caused by war. O’Brien is trying to cope, mostly through writing these war stories but has yet to put it behind him. He feels guilt, grief, and responsibility, even making up possible scenarios about the life of the man he killed and the type of person he was. This

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1284 Words | 6 Pages

Tim O’Brien never lies. While we realise at the end of the book that Kiowa, Mitchell Sanders and Rat Kiley are all fictional characters, O’Brien is actually trying to tell us that there is a lot more truth hidden in these imagined characters than we think. This suggests that the experiences he went through were so traumatic, the only way to describe it was through the projection of fictional characters. O’Brien explores the relationship between war experiences and storytelling by blurring the lines between truth and fiction. While storytelling can change and shape a reader’s opinions and perspective, it might also be the closest in helping O’Brien cope with the complexity of war experiences, where the concepts like moral and immorality are being distorted.

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1413 Words | 6 Pages

In The Things They Carried, O’Brien’s story-telling method is an attempt to show that the lines between fiction and reality are often not that far. Even though the names or details may not be fully accurate, this does not change the fact that they are a reality for many. Additionally, he challenges the importance that we place on war and links it to a storytelling aspect because he’s pointing out that not every story has a moral to it. With tragic events, we typically want some sort of meaning behind them, some sort of assurance that the incident was not for nothing. However, this is not always true, as a character “Yeah, well…I don’t see no moral”…

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772 Words | 4 Pages

Psychological Warfare in ​The Things They Carried Unless you have been in war or have read ​The Things They Carried​, you can't fully understand the psychological toll on a person's mind and body, you can't understand the psychological hardship soldiers go through in war. However, ​The Things They Carried​, by Tim O'Brien, is written to where it shows the overall psychological effects of war on soldiers in and out of Vietnam; as shown throughout the story, the recurring themes of trauma, love, and guilt give the clear psychological implications of war.

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A lot happens in Tim O 'Brien short story "The Things They Carried", at first, the reader speculates what the short story is about and why it is called "The Things They Carried". The narrator Tim O 'Brien tells and describes all the things that the men have to carry while "in-country" during the Vietnam War in the1960 's. The text 's artistic value comes from its plot, characters, conflict, and style. In the plot of the story the protagonist, Tim O 'Brien starts by describing circumstances that happened while he was in Vietnam. In the beginning of "The Things They Carried" we are introduced to each character by the things they carry.

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The Things They Carried The novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien tells the story of soldiers during the time of the Vietnam War. Each of the characters in the story bear tangible things that have a deeper symbolic meaning to each of the individuals. The most prominent of all of the soldiers tales was that of Kiowa: he carried both his grandfather 's hatchet and a bible, each of these objects held a special significance.

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“That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future ... Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story” (36). The Things They Carried is a captivating novel that gives an inside look at the life of a soldier in the Vietnam War through the personal stories of the author, Tim O’Brien . Having been in the middle of war, O’Brien has personal experiences to back up his opinion about the war.

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