Analysis: the Man He Killed

The tone in these lines are often humorous and at the same time genuinely loving. In short, the tone of this poem is as complex as the subject with which it so memorably

John Cox is the author of To Kill a People and a professor at UNCC. Meeting John Cox was very exciting because I never met an author before. I can't believe he took the time to sit down with us, discuss his book, and answer our questions.

​Darn Paul O’Connor, he just gets more and more interesting, doesn’t he? After writing about him throughout this chapter, I did just a little bit more researching into him. And boy, it gets better! Seriously. Remember how he said – well, first of all, let’s recount a bit. He told author David Lifton in 1979 that Kennedy “didn’t have any brains left…The wound in his head was terrific…eight by four inches…The wound was in the occipital-parietal area…clear up around the frontal area of the brain…the cranium was empty…” His story seemed to be consistent over the years. Yes, I said “seemed”. Ready for the big change? In the 1988 documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy, apart from telling us everything he had claimed before, he said something quite

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is a portrait for war stories. Sandy Kempner's letter paints a clear picture. His role in Vietnam proves the toll it takes on mind, body, and spirit. The author uses the rhetorical devices of imagery, irony, and anaphora to illustrate his environment.

Words similar to this are used throughout the poem which makes the reader feel empathy to the drinker.

     The poem starts off brilliantly. “The first four lines are beautifully phrased, and the opening couplet in particular has ingrained itself in the collective consciousness” (Blair, 1). “She walks in beauty, like the night/ Of cloudless climes and starry skies;/ And all

The way the plot of Killings by Andre Dubus is arranged changes how the reader sees the characters in the story. This plot starts out in the present, then goes into the past, then back to the present. There are two main characters, and three secondary characters in this story. The way the reader views all of these characters is affected by the plot arrangement. The two primary characters who are most important to the plot, and also most affected by the plot arrangement, are Matt Fowler and Richard Strout. Because the first thing the reader reads in the exposition of the story is “On the August morning when Matt Fowler buried his youngest son, Frank, who had lived for twenty-one years, eight months, and four days…” pg 93, and not Richard Strout’s backstory and reasoning for his actions, they are immediately persuaded by the author to feel sympathy towards Matt. The author needs the reader to feel this sympathy so that when Matt kills Strout at the climax of the plot, Matt is not viewed as the antagonist of the story, but rather as the protagonist. The author needs the reader to view Strout as the antagonist so that the reader does not dislike Matt, and so that the story is one of justified revenge and not just another murder. If the reader had been presented with the plot in chronological order, with Strout’s backstory and reasoning for killing Frank first, then the reader might almost feel bad for Strout. If seen like this, one might conclude that, while he did not take

The Man I Killed is the story of the man that Tim O’Brien killed. However, this story is not true. He later mentions that he did not in fact kill the man, yet he was present and that was enough. This story, according to him, is told to show the reader how he feels, because O’Brien feels as though the truth is that by doing nothing, he killed the man, so in his story, he does kill the man. Imagery is the biggest literary device seen in this story, but diction also helps make the story seem more true, it helps the reader to truly believe that O’Brien did in fact throw the grenade that killed the man. This story is told from O’Brien’s point of view, which would be first person, despite the fact that the word “I” is

The similar theme is that war changes people and tears them apart due to the pain and suffering of the war. “Cursing the war, cursing himself, cursing everybody”(O’Flaherty 208). The quote helps show that the war may cause you to curse things you never would've before, like, yourself. And from the poem “He thought he’d list perhaps/ Off hand like just as I/ Was out of work, had sold his traps/ No other reason why”(Hardy 16-20). This tells how war can force people to make erratic decisions, it changes your attitude and morals about any situation including joining the army and going to war. The difference between the two stories is that in “The Sniper” it turns him against his family and in “The Man He Killed” it turned the soldier against his friends. To prove this, “Then the sniper turned over the dead body and looked into his brother's face”(O’Flaherty, page 208). Again this tells of the shock the sniper received when he saw it was his brother he had killed. But in the opposing story “Yes, quaint and curious war is!/ You shoot a fellow down/ You’d treat if met where any bar is/ Or help to half-a-crown”(Hardy 17-20). It explains of how he killed a man that the soldier would have befriended in any other situation. All in all, you can see both the similarities and differences in both stories

The National Geographic film, A Portrait of a Killer, examines the types of stress that living beings can endure, and how it can thus affect the rest of their bodies. Severe chronic stress can lead even lead to the destruction of brain cells. Dr. Robert Sapolsky is a neurobiologist of Stanford University who has been researching stress for over thirty years. In order to study stress and its implications upon nonhumans, he went to Africa to study baboons. This species has only three hours of stress caused by eating, and the rest of their daily routine is consumed by about nine hours of free time. Much like Western society, baboons socially stress out one another, as they have social hierarchies to regulate how them interact with one another.

While this popular economic history will most appeal to readers with an interest in Wyoming, it raises the broader question of how our interpretation of the past influences current policy decisions.

Kiowa was against it, he felt like it was wrong and since he was religious he felt like setting up camp and base of operations in a church was bad news. Dobbins however wasn’t all that religious, he believed in god but it was just being nice to people that mattered to him. Kiowa grew up loving churches and carrying The Bible around but Dobbins hated churches.

Douglas MacArthur once said “ the soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wound and scars of war “ Wars from the past have shaped our culture and others have destroyed it. Love ones have said goodbye, not knowing it would be their last goodbye. In the short author Liam O’Flaherty includes the element of surprise that war can not only physical risk but psychological suffering.

In this poem, ‘The Man He Killed’, the poet Thomas Hardy explores a complex theme, which is war, using the simplest language. Throughout this essay I will be discussing the thoughts and opinions Hardy has on war.

Death is inevitable in every person’s life, but death in these character’s lives is easily predicted to be early, and this represents the sadness and sorrows in the innocence of war. There are many ways to die, and war is the saddest way for that to occur, but at the same time,