Who is elroy in thing they carried

She cannot understand why her father cannot put the war behind him. What does Tim say is Elroy role in his life? Category: books and literature fiction. What does Tim say is Elroy Berdhal's role in his life? Whether it be why he was there or why he was alone. The probability was that he already knew. How did Curt Lemon die? Why ultimately does O'Brien go to war? Who is Elroy Berdahl What does he represent? How can you tell a true war story? What is the tone of on the Rainy River?

Who was the hero of the narrator's life? Why did Jensen break his own nose? What is the overall message of the things they carried? What does coward I went to war mean? What is O'Brien suggesting when he describes himself as having had a modest stand against the war? How did Tim O'Brien feel about the war? What did Rat Kiley carry? What does the Rainy River symbolize? What is the purpose of on the Rainy River? Similar Asks. What is the difference between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy?

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The man that Tim O'Brien considers to be his "life hero. O'Brien stays with Berdahl for a week at The Tip Top Lodge, where Berdahl offers him money and the opportunity to flee while they're out on a boat ride. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance. They return to the lodge, and O'Brien departs for home and, eventually, for Vietnam. From the first sentence of the chapter, O'Brien begins to impress, however subtly, the importance of the novel's form, a blend of war autobiography and writer's memoir.

Readers should note that a writer's memoir is a form of autobiography. Generally, a writer's memoir is more essayistic and contemplative than an autobiography, in which an author recounts scenes from his or her own life. Writer's memoirs frequently describe how a writer writes and what the conditions were — mental and emotional — that surrounded the production of some literary or journalistic work. The admission that "this is one story I've never told before" signals two points to the reader.

First, the story establishes a confessional tone and creates an immediate empathy between the reader and the O'Brien character. Second, in the context of the preceding chapter, the reader knows that this is an unresolved story, perhaps a fragment of memory that, given O'Brien's philosophy of storytelling, is being crafted into a story as a means for understanding the events of the past.

Yet the story is not fragmentary and disconnected, abruptly moving between memories. The overall form of the chapter is narrative, though the stream-of-consciousness interjection of raw emotions interrupts the story's fluidity. For example, when O'Brien discusses the justifications that apparently underpinned U. The uncertainty continues to disturb him until he takes this "act of remembrance" and makes sense of moral disorder by committing it to paper and formulating it into a story for the narrator himself and the novel's readers to understand.

An important difference exists between the physical and sensory detail O'Brien employs at the beginning of the chapter, or rather the lack of it, and the attention paid to it at the chapter's close. I felt no personal danger. An example of this detail is the contrast of O'Brien's work in the meatpacking plant to the future that he hopes awaits him in graduate school. O'Brien works in the meatpacking plant as a summer job, not as an occupation that will become a full-time career.

He has aspirations, and those aspirations are higher than working in such conditions. Work in the plant, for O'Brien, is nearly an indignity, an indignity that is surpassed only by his participation in a war that he morally opposes. O'Brien offers this variation in detail for the following reason: the former, with its "dense greasy pig-stink," elicits a strong reaction from the reader.

The effect also appears when Elroy Berdahl perceptively tells O'Brien that he had wondered about the smell. The metaphor of the pork product assembly line also extends to the military machine that drafts soldiers and sends them to war. O'Brien only took action to evade the draft and follow his own inclinations rather than follow the expectations of his community after he "felt something break open in [his] chest…a physical rupture — a cracking-leaking-popping feeling.

He creates a complex relationship between physical detail, his ability to understand the story of his own life, and the audience's ability to understand the vicarious lessons of war, even if those lessons are paradoxical. O'Brien sets up paradoxical relationships that are revisited in various forms throughout the novel.

One such paradox is that of courage and fear. He explains that he was "ashamed to be doing the right thing" in following his conscience and going to Canada.