Tim O'Brien uses various types of rhetoric to introduce and familiarize the hardships and travesties of war with those who have never experienced it in his novel The Things They Carried. Bringing new light and perspective to a story told before, O’Brien uses his narrator, the flexibility of truth, and repetition to assist his story telling.
In the beginning of the novel, we are introduced to a character named Tim O'Brien, sculpted from O’Brien’s personal experience as a Vietnam veteran (Biography), who proceeds to tell us this story is true, even when it isn't. O'Brien inserts Tim as a persona to prove his point about the relativity about truth. Claiming, “. . . It’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.” (O’Brien), Tim explains what actually happened is irrelevant, what matters is how it makes you feel. A "true" war story does not have to be accurate, it has to make the reader feel what the narrator felt. In this way, Tim the protagonist originally told a story about a man letting a fellow soldier slip away in the mud, but later it was suggested he himself who committed that act of weariness. With this rhetoric, O'Brien the author first puts us on the sidelines, letting us feel the loss in a very indirect way, but when Tim hints he was the culprit, two things things are …show more content…
For example, in “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien states, “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” In a later chapter, Tim relates an incident in which a man died in a fiery explosion, body parts flying everywhere, or at least he assumed. His eyes were
In the beginning of the novel, we are introduced to a character named Tim O'Brien, sculpted from O’Brien’s personal experience as a Vietnam veteran (Biography), who proceeds to tell us this story is true, even when it isn't. O'Brien inserts Tim as a persona to prove his point about the relativity about truth. Claiming, “. . . It’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.” (O’Brien), Tim explains what actually happened is irrelevant, what matters is how it makes you feel. A "true" war story does not have to be accurate, it has to make the reader feel what the narrator felt. In this way, Tim the protagonist originally told a story about a man letting a fellow soldier slip away in the mud, but later it was suggested he himself who committed that act of weariness. With this rhetoric, O'Brien the author first puts us on the sidelines, letting us feel the loss in a very indirect way, but when Tim hints he was the culprit, two things things are …show more content…
For example, in “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien states, “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” In a later chapter, Tim relates an incident in which a man died in a fiery explosion, body parts flying everywhere, or at least he assumed. His eyes were