Summary: The Things They Carried Rhetorical Analysis

In the novel The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien builds the emotion that various soldiers had during the Vietnam war specifically Rat Kiley’s emotion. The feeling of pain, grief, sorrowness, joy, and unity. O’Brien uses diction, anecdote, symbolism and imagery to better establish the tone and build the relationship between the members of the unit. O’Brien goes in depth to each war story he presents using these rhetorical devices to better explain the story to the reader.
Firstly O’Brien insist that a true war story is never moral and hints to us not to always believe each story that is told. O’Brien states “You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask”(83). And gives an example as he asserts “For example, we’ve all heard
A story that Kiley told differently to Lemon’s sister in order to make him look like a hero. O’Brien briefly rants, “But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing “Lemon Tree” as we threw down the parts”(83) Of course alluding to lemon tree as a symbol of Curt Lemon's death. Furthermore, exclaiming “Twenty years later, I can still see the sunlight on Lemon’s Face. I can see him turning, looking back at Rat Kiley, then he laughed and took that curious half step from shade into sunlight, his face suddenly brown and shining, and when his foot touched down, in that instant, he must’ve thought it was the sunlight that was killing him”(84). A detailed and descriptive thought that not only allows the reader to imagine the situation but understand it, feel it, and comprehend it in a whole other level.
In conclusion O’brien presents various rhetorical devices that help not only the reader understand the tone but establishes much more than just that by setting a mood of suspense to unify the relationships each soldier carried upon themselves and among