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Essay On O Brien Rhetorical Analysis

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O’Briens novel The Things They Carried is a unique text because each chapter tells an individual story. The work also becomes misleading because the chapters are told from different viewpoints. Rather than O’Brien using a traditional flow of chronological order, he tells the stories of his comrades to appeal to the reader at different times in the book. The reader can also begin to question O'Brien's reliability and truthfulness because of his uncommon style. The purpose is O’Briens way to cope with his experience in the Vietnam War; he retouches each memory individually depicting the story of his tragic experience at war.
The order in which O'Brien's story unfolds deviates from other novels by the way he narrates each chapter. O’Brien makes it hard for his audience to classify the book as a novel. Some pieces of the story can stand alone but all of the pieces are comprised to tell O'Brien's exposure to the war. A technique O’brien utilizes is repetition, he constantly retells events over and over again to add and subtract detail. In the chapter Field Trip, O’Brien revisits Vietnam with his daughter. They arrive to Kiowas place of death only for O’Brien to find a normal looking field. It is a different image than the one he has held in his mind for a very long time. However, O’Brien’s daughter …show more content…

Initially, the story is told in third person but the narrator seems to change as the novel unfolds. The reader may also notice that it does not flow in order, he constantly revisits the distant past and then returns to the present. O’Brien challenges the reader to believe his stories because of the way he blurs the boundaries between truth and fiction. Nonetheless, O’Brien purpose is to revisit the past and tell his experience at war in hopes of coming to an understanding of why it

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