The Immobility of Blind Patriotism: The Things They Carried

    “On the Rainy River” contains the heavy feelings of the narrator. On the rocking boat, feeling uncertainty with his choice of escape. He traveled to Minnesota, onto the lake, and onto the boat. Yet, twenty yards away from freedom away from the tragedy of war, he falters. He imagines the people in his life, the people outside his life, everyone, and he begins to crumple underneath the pressure. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the passage “On the Rainy River” discusses the immobility of the narrator, feeling trapped in a choice that is fueled by blind patriotism, and pushes the reader to imagine the situation of a choice with no right solution.

    O’Brien discusses the embarrassment and cowardly complacency of soldiers through the visualization of mockery from an audience of their life. Though O’Brien does not actually get confronted with real life people, he gets confronted with the embarrassment of dishonor. The audience tilts him back into the boat, “It was as if there were an audience to my life, that swirl of faces along the river, and in my head I could hear people screaming at me”(O’Brien). It was the mockery and the patriotic ridicule that forced O’Brien to his knees, the rock in the boat that shook him uncertain of his choices. The rocking of the “little aluminum boat” didn’t deter him, neither did the “wind and the sky”, it was when he “gripped the edge of the boat and leaned forward and thought, Now”. It was when he willed himself to crash into the water, take a leap of faith, that he threw himself back. The lines of people he saw on the water, “the town, the whole universe”, they disgraced him and turned him away. It was the embarrassment that trapped him to a choice. O’Brien notes, “It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was”. It is the blind patriotism that forced him to push back against the edge of the boat, the embarrassment. Through the notions of wavering uncertainty with the rocking boat, then the tsunami of ridicule and mockery from his own conscience, O’Brien is able to illustrate to the reader the impossibility of the choice. The mental fatigue of running and the emotional drain from complying. The audience he experiences, however, isn’t real. Those people in his town and in the whole universe do not float above the water to ridicule him, the person who is there? That quiet, old man holds a significant part in O’Brien’s cowardly choice.
    

    Tim O’Brien illustrates the position of a “true audience” through allusions to the Bible, having the eyes of a higher power by a pragmatic Elroy Berdahl. The quiet man that O’Brien encountered in his route of escape, his significance didn’t seem important to the heavy weighted decision that sat in a sloppy lump on O’Brien’s plate. However, by Elroy simply being there, offering choices like doors, he plays a mentor figure. O’Brien, crushed by his fear of shame, noticed Elroy’s quietness, “his mute watchfulness, he made it real. He was the true audience. He was a witness, like God, or like the gods, who look on in absolute silence as we live our lives, as we make our choices or fail to make them”. Elroy had explained that he had taken boys across the river before, helped them across the border by offering them the chance to swim. The same choice he gave to O’Brien. He watched from afar, watching the bobbing red bulb in the water, with absolute silence. God or the gods do not make any judgement while human choices are made and instead, they watch as those choices perform their consequences. Though they are supposed to make no judgement, they still have a knowing not present in a regular human, “When I told him I’d be leaving, the old man nodded as if he already knew. He looked down at the table and smiled”. It is interesting to see the old man smile, the pragmatic and still man smiling was not a regular occurrence that O’Brien understood. But having his “true audience” nod and understand his decision, it provided enough to push O’Brien to Vietnam. While Elroy made no judgement, it gives the idea that it was O’Brien to make his choice, and his alone. And further, it was not his courage that pushed him to Vietnam, but his fear.

    O’Brien highlights the irony of submitting to war and the reason for it by juxtaposing the two different connotations of leaving for war. As O’Brien battled his imagination, he decided that he would go to the war, and at the same time, he “would kill and maybe die because [he] was embarrassed not to”. This is ironic because being embarrassed not to kill and die is unheard of, but that makes the mood of the text more complex. Closer for the reader to understand the complexity of a drafted soldier feeling towards war. They’d be forced to fight for their own honor, the honor of their family, and their country. And with that, they’d serve and maybe die to preserve that blind patriotism. In this situation, there is not a correct choice, there is escape from a futile war and there is fighting in it. Both hold their own problems and escape. But, as O’Brien rethinks his experiences at war, every death he witnessed, the man he killed, the home he returned to, he didn’t find a happy ending. He simply stated, “I was a coward. I went to war”(O’Brien). The implications of war usually do not pertain to any sort of cowardice, often intertwined with bravery to serve and protect the country. However, through this lens, the reader can understand the trapped feeling of serving a nation. If he were to escape, he was disgraced, and similarly if he were to return home, he was felt with indifference. And as he felt the pressures of preserving honor, he was pressured to become a soldier. Then a veteran. But, as he stated, “I survived, but it’s not a happy ending”(O’Brien).

    In “On the Rainy River”, Tim O’Brien illustrates the feeling of entrapment of embarrassment and shame. By understanding the implications of preserving the honor of family and the nation, soldiers often sacrifice more than just their life. This pushes the reader into the tight shoes of the soldiers. O’Brien criticises the societal norm of embracing a forced draft. Through his experience of a futile war, he expresses the futility of mental strain about such a thing. War is innately human and conflict is expressed on many levels of the human condition, but when put in the shoes of a civilian man turned soldier without a choice, it applies the same feeling to the reader. O’Brien is a veteran and a writer, he is also a man and a son, same as he is a boy and a child. Both and all can be true, but identity does not portray purpose. It is decision and action, the choices made both passively and actively, the audience that watches, and the reason taken towards that make the human experience complex. Immobility is the same as mobility, just as a rocking boat on water is the same as standing out on a battlefield. Look out into the rain and wonder: Is the river running?