Shame And Embarrassment example essay topic

363 words
In the course of our lifetime we are caught in situations that we truly don't want to be in. When all is going well you occasionally get that bump in the road and it seems as if all is disrupted. There are times when things become unavoidable to the point where we are left with two choices, to run, or to go through with it. Tim O'Brien found himself somewhere he never thought he would be, Minnesota. He was on the run from that infamous little slip of paper, his draft note. Tim was to be a soldier in the Vietnam War and he could not possibly imagine anything worse.

His world had suddenly come to a complete halt and he simply could not bring himself to confront anyone or anything. This force that compels us to do the unthinkable is our own emotions resulting from what we think other people will speculate. In this chapter we learn a little more about the narrator as a person and the most important passage of this section, I believe was on page 59. "All those eyes on me-the town, the whole universe- and I couldn't risk the embarrassment. It was as if there was an audience to my life... Traitor They yelled.

Turncoat Pussy I felt myself blush. I couldn't tolerate it... I couldn't make myself brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that's all it was. And then I submitted.

I would go to the war- I would kill and maybe die because I was embarrassed not to". Could you even picture yourself in this scenario? I know that I can, many a time I have been shamed into doing something that was entirely against who I am as a person. The author could not bring himself to fight in the war for himself but for everyone else who would dare call him unpatriotic. The shame and embarrassment of running away was too much for him to bear, and he wasn't ready to leave all he knew without saying goodbye.