On the Rainy River and Character Similarities
... the coffee shops and stores; in short, he knows that these people expect any young man from their community to face up to obligations. The problem is that the narrator does not necessarily agree. Prevailing attitudes of a small town can influence situations much less dangerous than the one in O’Brien’s story. I too, shortly after finishing high school, faced a situation and was affected by people’s judgement in a very similar fashion to the young narrator in O’Brien’s story. One of the things O’Brien’s narrator dreads the most is a literal and figurative exile from the community; so did I in my own situation. O’Brien’s narrator says, “. . . but I also feared exile. . . I feared losing the respect of my parents. I feared the law,” and the explanation is very clear: the narrator knows how his hometown people think and feel about certain matters, and what they think and feel matter a great deal to him. In his mind he carries on conversations with them and admits to detesting what he calls their “blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all,” meaning their attitudes toward the war in Vietnam and whether or not young men should be willing to go fight. My situation carried similar emotional weight for me, even though I was certainly not put in a situation where anyone would possibly die: my long time girlfriend was pregnant; we were not married; and at that point at least, we had some time to figure out what to do because no one knew. But I most definitely felt the pressure of what I knew the folks in the community expected a man to do, and I, in fact, agreed. But agreeing did not help me figure out how to go about doing the ‘right’ thing. I remembered clearly just one year earlier when three graduating senior girls had turned u...