Mind Games

The aspect of the book that I found the most interesting was how Tim O’Brian seems to tell his reader one thing and then suddenly change his mind. This turns the book into more of a rhetorical teaching device than a war book.

For example he spends the whole chapter “The Man I Killed” repeating details about the man he killed merely to later tell us that he never killed him, it was a lie. His rhetoric, specifically in the repetition of details is so descriptive that I could feel his guilt. I felt so sorry for O’Brian. Then, when he says that the story was a lie, I felt betrayed. I had been tricked into feeling sorry for him. I didn’t want to believe the O’Brian who was telling me the story was false. This just proved to me how persuasive the rhetoric of pathos is. I had been convinced via O’Brian’s emotions to believe that he had killed this man and could not outlive the guilt of it. He had been so convincing that when he logically mentioned later that the story was false, I had a hard time changing my mind.

Another example of how he uses his mind games for rhetorical purposes is in how he teaches his reader how to tell a true war story in one chapter and then later says that there is no such thing as a true war story. This was more of a proof of the power of ethos. The true fact that he had fought in Vietnam had me convinced that his stories about Vietnam would be true.

I think that with the two examples listed above, O’Brian wants to show that stories, like war, are all about perspective. Each person tells a story differently from the next person just as each person experiences a war differently than the person fighting next to them. He also wants to show that the stories about war or death are more about the people in the story than the story itself. The purpose of the story is not to have a moral or an extraordinary tale or even anything truthful about it. The purpose of the story is to remember the people in it and to allow them to live on forever.