A Study Guide for Tim O'Brien's "On the Rainy River"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Tim O'Brien's "On the Rainy River," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535830126

Book preview

11

On the Rainy River

Tim O'Brien

1990

Introduction

On the Rainy River was first published as a short story in 1990, and later the same year as part of the longer work The Things They Carried. Critics and readers alike view author Tim O'Brien as one of the finest writers of the Vietnam era. O'Brien's novel Going After Cacciato won the National Book Award in 1979, and The Things They Carried, the collection containing On the Rainy River, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (Award for the Best Foreign Book). Critic Robert R. Harris of the New York Times wrote on March 11, 1990 that this book was among the best fiction ever written about any war.

On the Rainy River at first seems simple; it is the story of a young man trying to make a good decision about whether he should obey the call of his country and go to war. On closer reading, it is a beautiful and complicated narrative of an older man recalling his youth, trying to forgive himself for what he views as a moral breakdown. O'Brien chose to name his fictional narrator Tim O'Brien, and gives the narrator biographical details that are the same as his own, leading readers to assume the narrator and the writer are one and the same. Such is not the case. However, the technique allows the story to comment on the nature of storytelling, on the way fiction can sometimes tell the truth, and on how memory reconstitutes and recomposes the events of the past. On the Rainy River can be read as a coming-of-age story, a story with historical significance, and a study of the nature of traumatic stress.

Author Biography

O'Brien was born on October 1, 1946, in Austin, Minnesota. The family moved to Worthington, Minnesota, in 1956. O'Brien's father was a veteran of World War II and sold insurance. His mother, also a veteran, was an elementary school teacher. O'Brien exhibited an early interest in magic, a motif that appears in a number of his books.

O'Brien graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1968. He served as student body president and achieved Phi Beta Kappa status while there, and he had plans to attend Harvard University for graduate study in the fall of the same year. However, these plans were dashed when he received his draft notice. Although he had been mildly opposed to the war, he