Tim O Brien Rhetorical Analysis

Words: 611
Pages: 3

In intense moments with severe consequences; some are able to rise to the occasion, and others cannot no matter how much they try. In this section of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a character named Norman Bowker describes how he would tell someone about the time he almost won the Silver Star for attempting to save one of the members of his company, Kiowa, from drowning in the mud of a river in Vietnam. O’Brien uses vivid descriptions and poetic diction with an attentive and reflective tone before shifting into a different style of metafiction and a focus on parenthetical information to convey a desperate and aimless tone.

The passage begins by O’Brien setting up the dangerous environment at the river through dramatization of the