After reading these short stories, it is so difficult to
even think about what were the actual feelings being a soldier. Tim O’ Brien’s
way of portraying each and every aspect of war experience and the actual truth
behind these stories can take most readers to a place to actually feel his
descriptions. His writing style and way of story telling is so deep and intense
you I never wanted to put the book down for once.
The one story that speaks to me the most is “On The Rainy
River.” The story is told in a mix of first person narrative and flashback. The
narrator telling the story is the mature O’Brien, but he sometimes slips back
into the tone of his younger self. The younger O’Brien’s voice is more
entitled, and less complex. The tension between the two narrative voices, the
young and the old O’Brien, gives dramatic strength to a story that would
otherwise merely relate a young man’s thoughts about an important decision. One
of the scenes that keep replaying on my mind is the image of O’Brien working at
the meatpacking factory that foretells of what is to come in Vietnam. The
stench of dead pig hangs on the boy, just as the stink of death will permeate
war. But both are catastrophic yet witty situation. The soldiers joke around;
O’Brien with a hose washing down dead pigs is ridiculous in a humorous way.
Both the experience of the factory is isolated by both experiences, and finds
it hard to talk to other people about them afterwards. The way Tim O’ Brien
described every details of working at the meatpacking factory portrayed how
much the experiences affected him. Finally the climax occurs when O’Brien ends
the story with an irony. The fact that he was a coward made him do the bravest
thing, which was to place him in a life-threatening situation.
Your analysis is really good of the chapter "On The Rainy River." His writing style that shifts between his older self and younger self really does bring light to the story of the struggle he went through. He was very isolated in both the war and the meat factory and he is always carries the stench of death in both. These experiences seem to make it hard for him to talk about even now as writing the book he seems very hesitant on writing about this experience even though he did the bravest thing, which is to go to war when he could have jumped overboard and run away. He says he was a coward and that's why he went to war but everyone else sees it as brave and heroic.
ReplyDelete