1. Pick a single story, and analyze its rhetoric. In other words, tell us what argument it makes, and how it goes about making that argument. All the stories in this collection are ripe for the picking, but certainly consider "The Things They Carried", "On the Rainy River", "How to Tell a True War Story" and " Speaking of Courage" + "Notes".
2. What is the structure of The Things They Carried? How does it affect the content? (This is your classic "How does form=content?" question.)
3. Rhetoric often gets a bad name when politicians use it to spin the truth for unsavory reasons e.g. merely to get elected, to justify questionable foreign policy, to lobby for a dubious bill. How does O'Brien approach "truth"? What's at stake?
4. Compare the structure/rhetoric of Gimme Shelter with the structure of The Things They Carried.
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