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The short story “On the Rainy River” by Tim O’Brien is a powerful and thought-provoking tale that explores themes of patriotism, morality, and the burdens of war. The story follows the narrator, a young man named Tim, who is faced with a difficult decision when he receives his draft notice during the Vietnam War. Should he go to war and fight for his country or should he follow his conscience and escape to Canada? This article aims to provide answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about “On the Rainy River.”

In this section, we will delve into the key questions that readers often have about the story. From understanding the motivations of the protagonist to analyzing the symbolism used by the author, these questions and answers will help shed light on the complex themes and ideas presented in “On the Rainy River.”

See these On the Rainy River Questions and Answers

1. What is the significance of the Rainy River in the story?
2. Why does Tim struggle with the decision to go to war?
3. How does the narrator’s relationship with his family influence his decision?
4. What role does patriotism play in the story?
5. How does the author use symbolism to convey the emotional turmoil of the narrator?
6. What impact does the draft notice have on Tim’s perception of himself?
7. Why does Tim ultimately decide to go to war?
8. What does the story reveal about the moral dilemmas faced by soldiers during war?
9. How does the story challenge traditional notions of heroism?
10. What is the significance of the final scene in the story?
11. How does the author explore the theme of identity in “On the Rainy River”?
12. Why does Tim feel a sense of shame and guilt about his potential escape to Canada?
13. How does the story relate to the broader context of the Vietnam War?
14. What role does peer pressure play in Tim’s decision-making process?
15. How does the story address the concept of masculinity and its impact on Tim’s choices?
16. What does the story suggest about the long-lasting effects of war on those who participate?
17. How does Tim’s experience on the Rainy River shape his perspective on life?
18. What does the story suggest about the nature of courage and cowardice?
19. How does the narrative structure of the story contribute to its overall impact?
20. What does the story reveal about the power of storytelling and memory?
21. How does the author challenge societal expectations and norms through the character of Tim?
22. What is the significance of the title “On the Rainy River”?
23. How does the setting of the story contribute to its themes and atmosphere?
24. What does the story suggest about the role of fate and destiny in one’s life?
25. How does Tim’s encounter with Elroy Berdahl affect his decision?
26. What does the story suggest about the complexities of human emotions and motivations?
27. How does the story explore the concept of sacrifice?
28. What does the story reveal about the nature of truth and falsehood?
29. How does Tim’s experience on the Rainy River challenge his preconceived notions about war?
30. What is the author’s message about the futility and senselessness of war?
31. How does the story reflect the author’s own experiences during the Vietnam War?
32. What does the story suggest about the impact of societal expectations on an individual’s choices?
33. How does the story address the concept of personal and collective responsibility?
34. What does the story reveal about the power dynamics between individuals and institutions?
35. How does the story explore the theme of self-discovery and self-acceptance?
36. What does the story suggest about the role of forgiveness and redemption in one’s life?
37. How does the story challenge the notion of a clear distinction between right and wrong?
38. What does the story reveal about the complexities of human nature?
39. How does the story address the concept of shame and its impact on one’s decisions?
40. What does the story suggest about the connection between personal experiences and larger historical events?

By exploring these questions and answers, readers can gain a deeper understanding of the themes and ideas presented in “On the Rainy River.” This thought-provoking story continues to resonate with readers today, challenging us to reflect on the moral dilemmas faced by individuals during times of war and the impact of those choices on their lives.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s On the Rainy River

Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s On the Rainy River

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 3, 2021

An integral chapter in The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien’s “On the Rainy River” narrates the dilemma he faced during the summer of 1968 when he received his draft notice and considered fleeing to Canada. The story builds on a theme introduced in “The Things They Carried,” namely, that embarrassment and reputation act as more powerful motivations than valor or courage. In that piece, O’Brien observes that the soldiers’ “fear of blushing . . . had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor” (21). Indeed, he begins “On the Rainy River” by confessing that he has never told the upcoming story before because he was ashamed to do so. He imagines in 1968 that, when faced with the decision to go to war, he would behave bravely, would be like the Lone Ranger, and would tap “a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years” (43). Instead, he discovers the decision is much more complicated and paralyzing, caused largely by a split within him between his conscience and his reputation. He finds the historical facts and political reasons behind the Vietnam War “shrouded in uncertainty” (44) and much more complex than the people in his conservative midwestern hometown are willing to understand. Yet at the same time that he criticizes them for viewing the war in simple black-and-white terms, he states that he “feared ridicule and censure” (48) and imagines what they would say about him if he did run away to Canada. The matter comes down to “hot, stupid shame. I did not want people to think badly of me. Not my parents, not my brother and sister, not even the folks down at the Gobbler Café” (54). And, with his notions of masculine identity based on idealized figures who act bravely and decisively, and finding himself torn between the fear of dying and the fear of shame, he experiences a kind of intellectual paralysis, what he terms “a kind of schizophrenia . . . a moral freeze” (48, 59).

Tim O’Brien/WikiMedia

After O’Brien walks off the line at a pork-processing plant job that summer, drives to northern Minnesota, and ends up at an old fishing resort, the Tip Top Lodge, he encounters a more attainable and accepting vision of manhood in the owner, Elroy Berdahl. O’Brien calls him “the hero of my life” (51), largely because Berdahl is “a silent, watchful presence” (51) who “never pried . . . [and] never put me in a position that required lies or denials” (52). Unlike the people in his hometown, who will gossip and believe that the decision to go to war is an easy one, Berdahl realizes—or so O’Brien assumes—that in such a situation “words were insufficient . . . [and that] the problem had gone beyond discussion” (54). When Berdahl takes O’Brien fishing on the Rainy River, which separates Minnesota from Canada, he is confronted with the decision between one life or the other. In retrospect, he feels that Berdahl “meant to bring me up against the realities . . . to take me to edge” (58). But, faced with the choice and imagining a host of people, real and imaginary, on both shores encouraging him one way or the other, the fear of shame holds him back from jumping overboard and swimming to Canada. Even as O’Brien cries in the boat over his future, Berdahl does not speak but maintains a “mute watchfulness” (62), neither condemning nor praising his decision. The next day, he returns to his hometown and off to Vietnam not for moral, ethical, religious, or political reasons but “because I was embarrassed not to” (62). Turning the binary oppositions of bravery and cowardice on their head, he confesses that “I was a coward. I went to the war” (63).

Such inversions are typical of O’Brien’s narratives and reflect a postmodern perspective in which traditional binary oppositions disintegrate, and all that is left are “imprecisions and contingent truths” (Kaufmann 333). In an important essay on the novel, Catherine Calloway observes that O’Brien’s stories display an “epistemological ambivalence” in that they function as “multidimensional windows through which the war, the world and the ways of telling a war story can be viewed from many different angles and visions” (249–250). O’Brien points out that in war “the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity” (88) and that war is like “a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, old truths no longer true” (88). And, if knowledge and belief are founded on foundations that are illusory, then fiction paradoxically provides perhaps a more honest path to the truth. In fact, in another story from The Things They Carried , O’Brien’s asserts, “Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (203), an observation reinforced by the way characters such as Rat Kiley invent and exaggerate events in a story in order to discover the underlying sense of the situation. O’Brien himself practices this kind of exaggeration when he admits in “How to Tell a True War Story” that the story he has told about the gruesome death of a baby buffalo did not happen but that it was necessary to make “up a few things to get at the real truth” (91). Moreover, the dilemma that O’Brien faces in “On the Rainy River” appears in modified form in two of his other novels, If I Die in a Combat Zone and Going after Cacciato, where characters go to war because they are ashamed not to go. Yet he has stated in lectures about these incidents that “none of it’s true . . . No Elroy, no Tip-Top Lodge, no pig factory . . . I’ve never been to the Rainy River in my life.” In the end, what O’Brien sees as the purpose of fiction is “getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.”

Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

BIBLIOGRAPHY Calloway, Catherine. “ ‘How to Tell a True War Story’: Metafiction in The Things They Carried.” Critique 36, no. 4 (Summer 1995): 249–257. Kaufmann, Michael. “The Solace of Bad Form: Tim O’Brien’s Postmodernist Revisions of Vietnam in ‘Speaking of Courage.’ ” Critique 46, no. 4 (Summer 2005): 333–343. O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Penguin, 1991. ———. “Writing Vietnam.” Keynote Address. Brown University. April 21, 1999.

The Things They Carried

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"On The Rainy River" by Tim O’brien Analysis

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Published: Mar 14, 2019

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Works Cited:

Kotler, P. (2002). Marketing management (10th ed.). Prentice Hall.
Lancaster, G., & Reynolds, P. (2004). Marketing (4th ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.
Tanner, J. F., & Raymond, M. A. (2015). Principles of marketing. Flat World Knowledge.
Zeithaml, V. A., Bitner, M. J., & Gremler, D. D. (2013). Services marketing: Integrating customer focus across the firm. McGraw-Hill Education.
Pride, W. M., & Ferrell, O. C. (2012). Foundations of marketing (6th ed.). South-Western Cengage Learning.
Armstrong, G., & Kotler, P. (2017). Marketing: An introduction (13th ed.). Pearson Education.
Grönroos, C. (2000). Service management and marketing: A customer relationship management approach. Wiley.
Gronroos, C. (1997). Keynote paper: From marketing mix to relationship marketing-towards a paradigm shift in marketing. Management decision, 35(4), 322-339.
Vargo, S. L., & Lusch, R. F. (2004). Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing. Journal of Marketing, 68(1), 1-17.
Payne, A., Storbacka, K., & Frow, P. (2008). Managing the co-creation of value. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36(1), 83-96.

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The Things They Carried

By tim o'brien, the things they carried summary and analysis of “spin” and “on a rainy river”.

Summary of “Spin”

“Spin” is a collection of disjointed memories. Azar , a soldier, gives a crippled boy a chocolate bar. Mitchell Sanders pries off his own body lice and puts it in an envelope to send to the draft board in Ohio. Norman Bowker and Henry Dobbins play checkers every night to restore a sense of order into their lives. Lavender takes too many tranquilizers and says “we’ve got ourselves a nice mellow war today.” But aside from a few colorful events, O’Brien mostly remembers being bored and intermittently scared when he was at war.

The war was like a Ping-Pong ball, O’Brien writes: “You can put a fancy spin on it.” He is a 43-year-old writer. He can’t remember some things about the war. But the bad memories, like Kiowa sinking into a field or Curt Lemon being blown to pieces, keep playing over and over. O’Brien feels guilty about remembering these things and only writing war stories. His young daughter, Kathleen , tells him he should find a new topic and learn how to write a happy story. But O’Brien thinks that this task is almost impossible.

O’Brien tries to think of a happy war story. All he can remember is a man who deserted the army and went to live with a Red Cross nurse. But even that soldier eventually went back to the war because he wanted something to which to compare all the peace and quiet. O’Brien says the contrast made the soldier enjoy peace more.

Some of O’Brien’s strongest memories involve the personal quirks of his company of 19- and 20-year-olds. Bowker said he wishes his dad would write him a letter and say it’s ok if he doesn’t win any medals. Kiowa taught a rain dance to some of the other soldiers, who were disappointed when it didn’t instantly produce rain. Lavender adopted a puppy and fed it by hand until Azar took it, strapped it to a grenade, and pulled the pin. The grenade exploded, killing the dog.

“Spin” is a classic accusation usually made against journalists. When a journalist “spins” a story, they highlight certain facts and leave out others in order to manipulate the reader into believing whatever the journalist wants them to believe. Writing is inherently an act of exclusion. By stringing together a series of fragmented images and seemingly random memories, O’Brien demonstrates that spin is unavoidable.

The Things They Carried is of course related to works of journalism, as “Spin” points out with its very title. But it was published at a crucial time for journalism, when the medium itself was changing. Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and others were introducing a “new journalism,” where the reporter and his or her biases were an integral part of the story. The influence of this on O’Brien's journalistic fiction is clear. New journalism also affected Michael Herr’s novelistic and intensely personal journalism about the Vietnam War. O’Brien was not the only writer testing boundaries at this time and with this subject matter.

“Spin” is made up of sentence fragments, figments of ideas, and bits and pieces of stories. But many of the fragments foreshadow later events in the collection. Bowker turns out to be obsessed with medals (see “Speaking of Courage”), Kathleen turns out to be the most difficult audience for her father’s war stories (see “Field Trip”), Kiowa’s death is the emotional crisis of the book (see “Notes”), and Azar’s cruelty foreshadows his complicity in O’Brien’s most shameful act (see “The Ghost Soldiers”). The most poignant symbol in this story is that of the checker board. O’Brien implies that the soldiers play the structured game in order to bring order into their chaotic life. But war is not like a game of checkers. As it becomes increasingly clear, there are no fixed rules.

Summary of “On The Rainy River”

O’Brien prefaces this story by saying that it is a hard series of events for him to recount. He thinks that the story proves him to be a coward. It is the story of how he ended up serving in Vietnam.

After graduating from Macalester College in 1968, O’Brien planned to attend Harvard University. But on June 17, 1968, he received a draft card. He had to make the decision whether or not to go to war.

O’Brien had protested the war, but not strongly enough to be considered a pacifist. O’Brien is shamed to remember that he thought he was too good, too smart for the war -- so he considered running away to Canada. He was split between the instinct to run, and the instinct to do what everyone expected: go to war. At the time, he worked at a meatpacking factory hosing down pig carcasses. O’Brien recalls that summer that he always smelled of pig. He felt depressed and alone. He was angry that everyone in his town expected him to go to war, but no one knew the first thing about Vietnam or its history.

O’Brien recounts that he decided to run away to Canada. He left a note for his parents, and took the car and headed north. He found a fishing resort called the Tip Top Lodge, and the owner, Elroy Berdahl , took him in without asking questions. Berdahl never asked O’Brien questions, he just played Scrabble with the boy, gave him odd jobs to do, and ate meals with him. But O’Brien concluded that the old man read the paper, he was “no hick;” he knew that O’Brien was contemplating dodging the draft.

One day Berdahl took O’Brien out fishing one. Berdahl steered the boat all the way to the border with Canada and then waited. He even turned around, away from O’Brien, while the boy made his decision. The boy thought, Now’s my chance. He almost jumped out of the boat. He considered fleeing.

But he imagined a huge crowd of people in the mountains around the river. O’Brien writes that he imagined his parents watching, his town watching, Linda watching, all of the people from his past and future watching him make his decision. He imagined being hunted down by the FBI. In the end he couldn’t bring himself to jump out of the boat. O’Brien cried, but told Berdahl to take him back to the lodge. He paid Elroy for the room and drove home to his parents. “I was a coward,” he writes. “I went to war.” (55)

The story is told in a mix of first person narrative and flashback. The narrator telling the story is the mature O’Brien, but he sometimes slips back into the voice and tone of his younger self. The younger O’Brien’s voice is less mature, more entitled, and less morally complex. The tension between the two narrative voices, the young and the old O’Brien, gives dramatic intensity to a story that would otherwise merely relate a young man’s thoughts about an important decision. The interplay between the young and the old O’Brien lend dialogue to a story in which there isn’t much other dialogue.

“On the Rainy River” contains the main existential and moral crisis of the book. The turning point at the river is a classic Freudian scene. The boy wants to jump out of the boat, his ego and his id (his authentic desires) strain to go. But his superego (what society orders) constrains him. In this story, the superego is symbolized by O’Brien imagining large crowds of people watching him make his decision. The scene takes place on a river; water for Freud often symbolizes the unconscious, where the battle between the superego, id and ego takes place.

Ultimately others’ expectations of him are more powerful than O’Brien’s own moral compass. His deference to his superego is O’Brien’s tragic flaw. Tragic heroes in Greek plays also have a tragic flaw: the one shortcoming from which all of their other misdeeds flow. O’Brien’s tragic flaw is caving to society.

The image of O’Brien working at the meatpacking factory foreshadows of what is to come in Vietnam. The stench of dead pig hangs on the boy, just as the stink of death will permeate war. But both are tragic-comic situation. The troops joke around; O’Brien with a hose washing down dead pigs is absurd in a humorous way. Both the experience of the factory is isolated by both experiences, and finds it hard to talk to other people about them afterwards.

After a long buildup, and the climactic decision in the boat, O’Brien ends the story with a paradox. The fact that he was a coward made him do the bravest thing imaginable: place himself in a life-threatening situation. The New York Times book review of O’Brien’s book was titled “Too Embarrassed Not to Kill." Embarrassment and shame turn out to be the pervasive themes of the book.

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The Things They Carried Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Things They Carried is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

is this a war story, per se? if so who is the main character, and why?

This particular story is more about sexual longing than war. Mark Fossie seems to be the main character who wants to import his girlfriend.

What is it that Jimmy cross carries with him? What do they represent?

Jimmy always carries letters from Martha. His identity and hopes for the future are part of those letters.

How does Tim kill his first enemy

I think with a grenade.

Study Guide for The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried study guide contains a biography of Tim O'Brien, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

About The Things They Carried
The Things They Carried Summary
Character List

Essays for The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.

Rationalizing the Fear Within
Physical and Psychological Burdens
Role of Kathleen and Linda in The Things They Carried
Let’s Communicate: It’s Not About War
Turning Over a New Leaf: Facing the Pressures of Society

Lesson Plan for The Things They Carried

About the Author
Study Objectives
Common Core Standards
Introduction to The Things They Carried
Relationship to Other Books
Bringing in Technology
Notes to the Teacher
Related Links
The Things They Carried Bibliography

Home / Essay Samples / Psychology / Archetype / “On The Rainy River”: Archetypal Theories in Tim O’Brien’s Short Story

"On The Rainy River": Archetypal Theories in Tim O'Brien's Short Story

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"On The Rainy River": Archetypal Theories in Tim O'Brien's Short Story

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