Things They Carried Rhetorical Analysis

In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’brien reveals the hardship of war through different accounts of soldiers who experienced them. More specifically, he discusses the impact different characteristics of war had on the soldiers and the war itself. Tim O’brien uses personification, cause and effect, descriptive diction, and metaphor to convey how the animals made war horrifying, and the soldiers paranoid. Tim O’Brien’s purpose for having descriptive diction is to emphasize how the unordinary bugs terrified Rat, which ultimately made war horrifying. He reveals, “{Rat} couldn’t stop talking. Weird talk, too. Talking Talking about bugs, for instance: how the worst thing in Nam was the goddamn bugs. Big giant killer bugs, {Rat’d}

Everybody. Meat for the bugs.” The author compares war to a banquet, a type of dinner party. A party where the bugs will enjoy themselves, and the soldiers won’t. A party where the bugs will be the consumers, while the soldiers will be the meal. A feast for the bugs, but a nightmare for the soldiers. As expected, this would leave the soldiers fearful, making them paranoid and terrified. The metaphor O’Brien used leaves one to portrait war as nothing less than horrifying, the ultimate death zone for soldiers. Beside from using metaphor, O’Brien uses personification to convey the effect animals had on the soldiers, and war itself. He mentions, “{you’d} hear a strange hum in your ears...Tree frogs, maybe, or snakes or flying squirrels or who-knew-what.” The author’s purpose for using personification in this particular passage is to reveal how chilling this war is, how it’s unlike any other battlefield. Also, how it intimidated the soldiers. The war must had been alarming for these animals to behave this way, abnormal and out of character. Another reason why this war is horrifying. It’s more than likely that these soldiers weren’t expecting to hear these type of noises from animals, so their