The Things They Carried Rhetorical Analysis

The Things They Carried, is a reflection on how Tim O’Brien spent his days in Vietnam. There are many factors to why it can be difficult to share a war story, there is no proof to tell how much he is just telling a story or saying something else to make it easier to share his experience. “In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical.”pg.68. All throughout the book he says how you cannot believe a war story, and he wants to protect the people in his life like his daughter and himself from his own stories. There is a difference between happening-truth and story-truth, he uses his imagination to come up with an entire new truth for his readers and himself. Tim O’Brien uses his writing as a way to share his

To go into it, I’ve always thought, would only cause embarrassment for all of us.” pg.37. There is a major factor to why it is so hard to tell a true war story, and that is embarrassment. There are not many people that have shared the experience of going to war. So when he is sharing his story, it can be hard to get people to relate to what he is trying to say. It ties in with the fact that not a lot of men came home from the war and shared their stories, due to being embarrassed. It is such a different experience that not a lot of people can relate to. Throughout the stories you can see when it gets more difficult for Tim O’Brien to share certain details or leave things out and another reason for that would be guilt. They not only carry the physical burdens, they carry things they have done or failed to do. In the chapter “In the Field” it is a difficult story to tell and there are signs in the book referring to the boy as Tim O’Brien, but the readers wont know this. If someone has done something they feel guilty about, it is usually not easy for them to talk about it, I believe that is why Tim O’Brien wouldn't say the name of the boy in the field, to protect himself from the guilt of others