The Conflict Of Trust In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

“It’s time to be blunt… I want you to feel what I felt” (O’Brien 171). There are two sides to every war and throughout the novel The Things They Carried, the author Tim O’Brien creates a war in the reader’s mind centered on trust. O’Brien forces the reader to realize the impact of a true war story where, instead of giving an accurate account, he blurs the lines about the importance of trust and gives an emotionally driven anecdote. The author establishes ethos in a unique way by impacting the credibility of a story rarely with facts and forcing the reader to focus on what is more important to him: evoking emotion. These emotions envelop the entirety of Tim O 'Brien 's short stories, showing his clear intentions to make the reader feel what

They tug and pull at the reader questioning his truthfulness as a narrator by mixing fact with fiction. On one side, he brings the readers into trusting him by appealing to ethos throughout, throwing into the mix factual details such as, “I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now” (O’Brien 31). Certainly the reader will connect with those statements in which he reveals a little about his personal side, which are surely believable. To further the persuasive rhetoric, he then starts throwing in anecdote after anecdote all starting with the phrase “I remember” which occurs seventy-five times throughout the novel as a way to appeal, not only emotionally through nostalgia, but also by setting in stone the ethos that he is a veteran of the Vietnam War looking back at his personal experiences. He finally appeals to logic throughout, once again establishing his supposed truthfulness through rhetoric. This is evinced with his detailed descriptions of weaponry like “The M-60, M-16 and M-79...Chi-Coms and RPGs and Simonov carbines and black market Uzis...Claymore antipersonnel mine-3.5 pounds” (Page 7). He includes a laundry list of weaponry, through his colloquial language of weapons as an intentional way of proving to the readers his personal knowledge of the war, and in a broader sense, he proves that the reader can trust him with facts.

The chapter “On the Rainy River” can be analyzed to represent this style of storytelling throughout the length of the book. O’Brien uses antithesis in order to emphasize the particular moments in which emotional feelings were most apparent. Before the war begins, Tim runs away from home and is near the Canadian border, but he asks “What would you do?”(56), a use of erotesis in order to prove his point to the reader. He gives a few possibilities to the reader, but in the end, “All [he] could do was cry” (57). O’Brien makes a clear contrast between all the things he could have done at that moment, and makes his decision based on his emotions. This contrast is brought on through antithesis, where the contrast is the possibilities in his life between what he chooses from his emotions. Showing how one of the main conflicts in this chapters is due to his emotions, the reader realizes how important they are to his stories. As O’Brien contemplates crossing the border, escaping his responsibilities, he could not run away. He “Couldn’t make [himself] be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was”(59). O’Brien draws the conclusion that he was making his actions by morality, but rather by embarrassment. By opposing two polar themes of society’s idea of morality and his personal