“All those eyes on me – the town, the whole universe – and I couldn’t risk the embarrassment. It was as if there were an audience to my life that swirl of faces along the river and in my head I could hear the people screaming at me. Traitor! They yelled. Turncoat! Pussy! I felt myself blush. I couldn’t tolerate it. I couldn’t endure the mockery, or the disgrace or the patriotic ridicule. Even in my imagination, the shore just twenty yards away, I couldn’t make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was. And right then I submitted. I would go to the war – I would kill and maybe die – because I was embarrassed not to.” (Tim O’Brian pg. 57)
This quote comes from Tim O’Brian’s “The things they carried” from the section “On the rainy river”. This is important to the story because it expresses the internal conflict taking place in the conscious of the young Tim O’Brian when faced with the choice to face the war or run off to Canada to escape his fate.
This exact struggle could possibly be the biggest decision in almost every drafted young man’s life. I think this statement really ties together the whole reason for Adding this story to the collection, although it is tough and he doesn’t want to do it he will risk his life to fight for a cause he doesn’t fully agree with because he is afraid to let people down and give himself a bad image. This shows the power of peer pressure truly in action, and because of this pressure people who do not agree with the war will still risk their lives just to save their reputation.
Another outcome of this common struggle that seams apparent in this story is the bond between all of these different men coming from far different backgrounds all sharing this common internal struggle that they can all relate to.
During the time that men were being drafted for the war in Vietnam there are many stories just like O’Brian’s story of “The rainy river’. Even still today there is still the fear of another draft here are some examples I stumbled upon of how some people plan to avoid being drafted if it happens again.
Lani H. said:
ReplyDeleteI liked the quote you chose from Tim O’Brien’s “On the Rainy River.” I agree that this is the biggest internal conflict the author has, that this conflict spills over into the rest of the book.
Many young men of my generation faced this conflict. The draft was a hardship on everyone in that war. It set the whole country up for failure and began a struggle that still looms today as a dark shadow.
Your picture is peaceful and beautiful. If it is not the Rainy River area, it sure brings that to mind.