Rhetorical Analysis Essay On Later Adulthood

It is especially important that an adult is able to open up about their emotions; if one cannot be honest about who they are and what they are feeling not only do they miss out on individuality but they also miss out on expanding their world perspective. Something that separates an adult from a child is that adults have more life experience and therefore have more wisdom and a better understanding of the world. O’Brien describes the soldiers’ behavior as firing seizes, “Awkwardly, the men would reassemble themselves, first in private, then in groups, becoming soldiers again” (O’Brien 18) When the firing ends and each soldier realizes his physicality has unmasked his true emotions, he internally "reassembles" himself into a man and a soldier

before the other soldiers around him can notice. This is indicated when O'Brien says that when they would reassemble themselves, they did it “first in private".

The word "men" is plural which is implying, along with the phrase “then in groups”, that every boy in the platoon went through the process of becoming a soldier again after the firing ended. Despite expectations that the soldiers must act as brave tough and strong men, each soldier is internally aware that he is just a boy and that when the bullets flew around him, he had acted as such. Each soldier then makes his best effort to hide this side of him from his fellow soldiers as they shift their attention back to showcasing the illusion of what society calls manliness. O’Brien describes them shortly after they have reassembled themselves to become soldiers again, “They would squint into the dense, oppressive sunlight. For a few moments, perhaps, they would fall silent, lighting a joint and tracking its passage from man to man, inhaling, holding in the humiliation. Scary stuff, one of them might say. But then someone else would grin or flick his eyebrows and say, Roger-dodger, almost cut me a new asshole, almost”(#) This quote shows that by emotionally withholding themselves from one another, the soldiers are hurting

themselves. They would rather squint into the blinding sun then look at each other because they feel so humiliated that they acted scared. They have no way of emotionally bonding because they do not open up about their emotional fears, burdens, and wounds with each other. They must use drugs as a means of bonding and as a way to hold in their humiliation, drugs that hurt them like staring into sunlight hurts them. One as one may speak the truth in soft language, minimizing that traumatizing experience into “scary stuff”, another would make even more of a joke of it talking about how a bullet almost gave him a new asshole. By pretending to be fearless and emotionless the soldiers put barriers up, dividing and isolating themselves, and are therefore confining their worlds and knowledge to an unexpandable child sized bubble.