The Vietnam War was a time of complete and utter madness for the United States. It was the 1960s-the United States was fighting Communist views, the Civil Rights Movement was in full force, and all the hippies wanted world peace. In Tim O’Brien’s work of fiction, “On The Rainy River,” he uses rhetorical devices such as a confessional tone, the theme of embarrassment as motivation, metaphor, and rhetorical question to help explore the utter conflict one can have when being shamed into fighting a war one does not believe in.

Unfortunately, Tim O’Brien was in a huge moral dilemma-the question of avoiding the draft or fighting for a war he did not believe in. A lot of people were faced with the same moral issue, when the United States decided …show more content…
During the summer of 1968, O’Brien spent time working in a meatpacking plant, “As a carcass passed by, you’d lean forward and swing the gun up against the clots and squeeze the trigger, all in one motion, and the brush would whirl and water would come shooting out and you’d hear a quick splattering sound as the clots dissolved into a fine red mist”(O’Brien, paragraph 6). O’Brien’s job at the meatpacking plant could be looked upon as a metaphor to those not being able to get out of the draft, who had to go to war. The carcasses rolling by could be compared to the unlucky soldiers off to war, and the use of the gun on the pigs, foreshadowed what O’Brien would be doing in Vietnam. Also, O’Brien’s use of rhetorical question really helped show the dilemma he was in, “Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and you're dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry as I did”(O’Brien, paragraph 6). Those rhetorical questions make the reader think what it would be like to be in O’Brien’s shoes. They really help to prove how emotionally draining it was for O’Brien to have to fight for something he did not believe