On The Rainy River Diction

The alien species under discussion in this essay is the Nile Perch. The Nile Perch is seen throughout much of the Afrotropic ecozone, as well as being native to the Nile, Senegal, Congo, Volta, Niger, Lake Turkana, and Lake Chad. The Nile Perch was introduced manually into Lake Victoria in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Lake Victoria covers a total of 69,000 square kilometres,

What’s your name? Are you lost?” “Yes, my tribe left without me.” “I can help you search for them. Come on, we going to see one of my friends.”

Or if they just flew away” (Salinger 16). Holden does not ask this question out loud, but rather to himself. During this time, he is going through the problem of being expelled from yet another school. The icy, frozen over pond is how he sees his life at the moment, cold and hard. This may be the start of his depression.

Eskimo is the name used for groups in Canada and Greenland. One of the group names are the Inuit. The types of shelters are an igloo or a karmak for the winter and tepee, in the warmer weather. They used typical materials that were hard to find in the artic. Some of the materials were mud and wood.

One of the main reasons O’Brien, a Vietnam veteran, wrote this novel, was “to communicate his traumas incommunicability (Hope College/WTS Journal List)” to the outside world in a way that verbalizing never could. The war left many soldiers so damaged that they failed at communicating feelings of guilt and trauma to others. The book shows this several times and it is one of the largest ways in which the Vietnam War mentally affected those closest to it. In the section titled, “Speaking of Courage”, Norman Bowker, a Vietnam veteran who fought with O’Brien, drives around a lake thinking of the war. He is unable to explain his war experiences to people who will listen.

In the short story “On the Rainy River” by Tim O’Brien, the main character Tim O’Brien gets a letter notifying him that he has been selected for the draft; he is affected by this emotionally, physically, and he faces a moral dilemma because this war goes against what he believes in. Immediately upon receiving the letter O’Brien thinks, “I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldn’t happen. I was above it” (1003).

Jurgis’s dad, Dede Antanas, succumbs to the cold and his damp, dangerous working conditions and dies while working in the pickling rooms at a meat factory. The time for the wedding mentioned in the beginning has arrived, and the outcome leaves the poor family with more than one hundred dollars in debt. Afraid of the consequences of not being able to pay it off, more of the family works harder than ever, including Ona in a ham sewing factory, and eventually the young boys of the family as newsboys. Despite this rising debt, Marija’s factory closes and Jurgis is cut back on his hours. Outraged at this unfairness, Jurgis, as well as the rest of the eligible family members, join the Union and start to participate passionately.

As an attempt to mend the breaking bonds between them, they decide to go to their cabin near Lake of The Woods, in Minnesota. Their stay was going great, until one morning John awoke only to find out that Kathy was gone, nowhere to be seen. The author, Tim O’Brien got a majority of his inspiration from what he experienced in the Vietnam War. Tim O’Brien uses symbolism to reveal the hidden aspects of life. The symbols he used were magic, the idea that one plus one equals zero and uncertainty.

Cook published a significant experience that took place in December 1938, in New York State, when he was walking up Kinderhook Creek: “Glancing upstream, I noticed a dark object floating down in midstream. As it came nearer, it resolved itself into an otter. I watched the animal come down through two riffles, with head well up, body and tail held stiff and hind legs wide apart, very obviously enjoying a free ride. It skillfully avoided boulders and kept itself in the swiftest current.” There is another sign that I have not seen, but which is described by Grinnell, Dixon, and Linsdale (1937).

Chris McCandless was a guy who thought it would be a brilliant idea to go out into the wilderness and live out there. He made many mistakes with living in the wilderness for starters he was very ill prepared, Chris did not bring enough food to survive and with that he had to find his own food. When Chris started to leave he decided he's going to get rid of all his money and so he burned some of it and gave the rest of the money to charity. Chris hunted little animals and then he killed a moose he ended up not preserving it correctly and he had to get rid of it because it became old and gross. For a guy to get a book and a movie written about his life and ultimate death, do you think that’s right?

In comparison, The Things They Carried and The Battle of Ong Thanh video had several alike features such as youthfulness, unfamiliar surroundings, and the fear of dying. For example, in the video soldiers would talk about their experience and feeling towards it. As said in The Things They Carried, “In June of 1968, a month after graduation from Macalester College, I was drafted to fight a war I hated. I was twenty-one years old” (38). These men were scared, untrained, and no longer hopeful for the future.

(O’Brien 44) At the root of all his worries is the very fact that the fear of partaking in a war was very evident in Tim and was a driving force in the decision to flee to Canada. His fear came in forms of uncertainty towards taking another humans life, and later stated as “...walking away from my own life, my friends, and my family, my whole history, everything that mattered to me.” (O’Brien 44-45) More than anything, O’Brien was afraid of rejection from everything that was familiar to him. O’Brien also claims that he “...was born into a mainstream life....”

O’Brien describes his experience at the Tip Top Lodge as one that resolved an immense inner conflict he faced. When O’Brien received his draft card in the mail to fight in Vietnam, he immediately had to face the fact that he had been “drafted to fight a war that [he] hated” (O’Brien 38). In the face of danger and what he deemed as “moral confusion,” O’Brien suddenly decided that fleeing to Canada was the only way to avoid fighting in Vietnam. While driving north, O’Brien stopped at a fishing resort called the Tip Top Lodge and met Elroy Berdahl. While he refrained from asking obvious questions during O’Brien’s six-day-stay, Berdahl presumably understood O’Brien’s situation.

Near the start of the chapter “On the Rainy River”, O’Brien receives the one notice in the mail which he had been hoping to avoid for the rest of his life: he is drafted and enlisted for duty in the Vietnam War. Long before he received the notice he went through negative warlike experiences such as hating boy scouts. Additionally, he feels as if there is no point in the war, but the people in his town keep encouraging him to go. Troubled with a large dilemma, he goes back to his hometown in Minnesota, pondering for days. Eventually, he thinks of himself as a coward, and he reveals that he “couldn’t endure the mockery, or the disgrace or the patriotic ridicule…[he] couldn’t make [himself] be brave...

Different voices and tones depict the various ways that characters in a novel suffer. Julia Alvarez, Tim O’Brien, Zainab Salbi, and Sebastian Junger illustrate the hardship of war, and how a war participant is shaped by the concept of war. All four authors/lecturers present a different perspective on war; however the four authors/lecturers are cohesive with the idea of war being complex. In Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, Alvarez parallels a historical event with fictional sisters who fight a war by not succumbing to the suppressive laws.