Spin By Tim O Brien Rhetorical Analysis

In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the author retells the chilling, and oftentimes gruesome, experiences of the Vietnam war. He utilizes many anecdotes and other rhetorical devices in his stories to paint the image of what war is really like to people who have never experienced it. In the short stories “Spin,” “The Man I Killed,” and “ ,” O’Brien gives reader the perfect understanding of the Vietnam by placing them directly into the war itself.
In “Spin,” O’Brien expresses the general theme of war being boring and unpredictable, as well as the soldiers being young and unpredictable. Unlike Henry Dobbins and Norman Bower’s chess games which were predictable and made it easy to see which side was going to win, war was the complete opposite.

It is assumed that no one actually enlists with the sole purpose of killing people.This next short story is entitled “The Man I Killed.” Right off the bat, O’Brien goes into extremely gruesome details of the body of the boy he just killed. He describes the wounds for half of a paragraph. In this story, the reader can feel the guilt in the author as he stands on the trail, thinking about this boy’s life before he brutally murdered him. O’Brien creates this backstory for this boy. How he grew up listening to stories of his ancestors protecting their land and that it was a tradition to die fighting for your own land. But O’Brien could see that this boy was weak and tiny and young. He could see that his face was smooth with no facial hair and fingers were thin. This brought so much more guilt onto him. He goes on to produce this story of the boy’s life had he not killed him. He would have gone to University for mathematics, and he would avoid politics. He probably met a girl before the war and they exchanged gold rings, and she liked that he was thin and frail. The author uses repetition in this short story by repeating the details of the wounds. He mentions “his jaw in his throat” and the “star shaped hole in his eye” several times. One can infer that these details are the worst of them all, and carry the most weight from the