Brandy Bigler
September 30, 2010
Summary v. Analysis Blog Post
Tim O’Brien’s “On the Rainy River” is set in the summer of 1968. Tim O’Brien had just graduated from college and was ready to enter the real world. One month later, the real world found O’Brien, and on June 17, 1968 a draft notice for the Vietnam War arrived in the mail. O’Brien was not a supporter of the war in any way. Unfortunately, he was drafted for the war he hated and he felt as though he was too good for the war. The story describes how he spent his summer before entering the war. This is a story he claims to have never told anyone.
As the story goes, O’Brien spent his summer working in a meat packing plant and would go home every night smelling like pig. In mid July, O’Brien starts to think about running to Canada. He didn’t know whether he should stay and fight in the war, or whether he should run from it. One morning O’Brien decides that he has had enough of waffling over his decision. He walks out of work, leaves a note for his parents, and starts driving north. He drives for hours until he becomes exhausted and decides to get off the road for a while. He pulls into a place called The Tip Top Lodge that sits along the Rainy River, which divides Canada from the US. He meets an elderly man, named Elroy, who owns the lodge. O’Brien stays at the Tip Top Lodge for six days and during those six days he spends most of the time with Elroy. On the sixth day Elroy and O’Brien take a boat out onto the Rainy River to go fishing. Once there, O’Brien looks from one shore to the other and realizes that he must face his fears and fight in the war. He cannot pull himself to actually make the decision and after twenty minutes Elroy tells him that the “fish ain’t biting today” (60). At that moment, Elroy becomes the hero of O’Brien’s life.
In the story, O’Brien is a young kid just out of college who is faced almost immediately with a decision that kids of his age should never be faced with. He was not ready to make the decision for himself and he finds himself sitting on the Rainy River with a wise elderly man. On one side, he has the US and the Vietnam War. On the other he has Canada and a sense of freedom. He does not want to leave his life behind but he also does not want to go back and face his fate. The river in the story serves as the barrier of the decision he must make and equally as the symbol of his indecision. “…it occurred to me that at some point we must’ve passed into Canadian waters, across that dotted line between two different worlds, and I remember a sudden tightness in my chest as I looked up and watched the far shore come at me” (55). The river is a divider between what he has always known and a new, unknown, scary world. He is sitting at the point where he must make a decision but he cannot seem to make the decision for himself. He breaks down and cries because he is too young to make such a large decision. Elroy realized that O’Brien did not want to leave and simply made the decision for him by taking O’Brien back to the US shoreline. Elroy brought O’Brien “up against the realities” to choose life for himself. Ultimately Elroy made the decision for O’Brien when he noticed that O’Brien did not want to go, and this is why O’Brien considers him the hero of his life.
Work Cited
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. First Mariner Books, 2009. Print.
http://www.illyria.com/tob/tobbio.html
