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Tim O Brien Rhetorical Analysis Essay

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As Tim O'Brien discusses Curt Lemon's death, he effectively highlights the underlying paradoxes of a war story's truths by telling the same story in three accounts that each differ in diction, mood, tone, and sometimes imagery. For example, in the first paragraph, O'Brien utilizes a neutral, objective tone as he briefly lists the events before, during, and after Lemon's death. How so? O'Brien implicates his staunch neutrality in the middle of the first paragraph, where he nonchalantly recants, "He [Curt Lemon] was playing catch with Rat Kiley, laughing, and then he was dead." Here O'Brien seems to be playing with the audience's emotions, as he intentionally uses phrases such as "playing catch" and "laughing" to indicate vibrancy and child-like …show more content…

Moreover, it seems that O'Brien tries to address our society's obsession with cold, unbiased facts by introducing the universal notion that a soldier's purpose is to die for their country. O'Brien continues to touch on finding the truth of a soldier's life in the next paragraph, where he utilizes an optimistic, almost joyful tone as he hones in on the "beauty" of Lemon's death. Oddly yet intentionally, O'Brien once again manipulates the emotions of the audience, this time through the use of irony. He takes what should normally be a somber moment and instead manages to emphasize how Lemon was a "handsome kid" with "sharp gray eyes" whose face was "brown and shining" when the bright sunlight he stepped into "lifted him up and sucked him into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms." Not only does he intentionally use words like "bright", "sunlight," and "shining" to elicit a hopeful, optimistic response from the audience, but he also seems to paint a mental picture of Lemon seemingly ascending into

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