ON the rainy river

When a Man’s Dignity Controls His Life Future, past, and present friends standing along the shore with shouting enemies and fate. These are some of the images seen by Tim in Tim O’Brien’s “On the Rainy River”. The character has a vivid hallucination that encompasses all of his rivaling thoughts about going to war. The hallucination describes all of the reasons Tim feels embarrassed. He is embarrassed to go to war because …

…becomes ashamed of the choice he made, and wishes he had made the other. Regretful and truly ashamed, that is how Tim finds himself. He let his visions become reality and control his actions. He let his dignity force him to fight the war. At the time, he felt better about going to the war, but in the end it was what truly embarrassed him. “I was a coward, I went to the war” (page 563).