Summary Of 'The Man I Killed'

The author, Tim O'Brien, is writing about an experience of a tour in the Vietnam conflict. This short story deals with inner conflicts of some individual soldiers and how they chose to deal with the realities of the Vietnam conflict, each in their own individual way as men, as soldiers.

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

However, the first chapter does contain one very powerful image of destruction from the Vietnamese viewpoint, which helps to make this somber portrait of the Vietnam War more complete. We are told that Berlin and his squad are taking refuge inside a nearly ruined Buddhist pagoda: ...in shadows was the cross-legged Buddha, smiling from its elevated stone perch. The pagoda was cold. Dank from a month of rain, the place smelled of clays and silicates and dope and old incense. It was a single square room built like a pillbox with stone walls and a flat ceiling that forced the men to stoop or kneel. Once it might have been a fine house of worship, but now it was junk. Sandbags blocked the windows. Bits of broken pottery lay under chipped pedestals. The buddha’s right arm was missing, but the smile was intact. Head cocked, the statue seemed interested in the lieutenant’s long sigh. (O’Brien 4) In this otherwise very American novel, which focuses on the American soldiers’ experiences, feelings, and minds (Lomperis 63), and in which Vietnam is presented primarily as merely a terrain

During this work, O’Brien keeps a casual tone. It sometimes gets more formal and serious, but for the most part, it’s friendly and almost playful. When he is describing the conversations he had with his friends, he looks back on them with happiness. Consequently, when he is describing the death of one of his friends, his tone gets more somber and less playful. For example, the entire chapter of “Stockings” is devoted to describing the soldier Henry Dobbins and an interesting knack of his. “Even now, twenty years later, I can see him wrapping his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck before heading out on an ambush.” This cute, two page chapter provides a bit of relief after the chapter about Mary Anne Belle. It has light connotations and is a generally funny short story. Later in the book, however, he gets more serious when talking about the death of his dear friend Kiowa. He

O'Brien's writing style is so vivid, the reader frequently finds himself accepting the events and details of this novel as absolute fact. To contrast truth and fiction, the author inserts reminders that the stories are not fact, but are mere representations of human emotion incommunicable as fact.

In “The man I killed”, O’Brien feels ashamed and guilty. In the chapter O’Brien is standing in front of a man he just killed in My Khe. While standing there he repeats detail about the man over and over again. Details about the man’s family, interest, goals, ambition, and struggles. O’Brien use of detail is like a confession, shame, and guilt. “He was not a fighter. His health was poor, his body small and frail. He liked books. He wanted someday to be a teacher of mathematics” (pg 119). O’Brien is ashamed because he did not follow his instinct of not fighting a war that was so very wrong and uncalled for. He felt guilty because while fighting a war he absolutely hated, he killed a man, a man who was in the same predicament as him. A man of

Both “The Man I Killed” and “The Man He Killed” deal with a touchy subject: the morals and ethics of killing someone in war. “The Man He Killed” is set during WW1 and is told through the perspective of an anonymous main character while “The Man I Killed” is set during the Vietnam war and is told through the perspective of O’Brien. The story may convey a similar message, but three things that set the two works of literature apart are the setting, reaction, and the person.

1. Narrator describes the dead man’s body in such details because he wanted to show the true reality of war. He wanted the audience to be able to visualize it yourself , identify yourself and feel the tragedy of war and its disastrous consequences: “his jaw in his throat, his upper lip and teath were gone, his eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole.” Narrator wanted readers call up feelings and provoke them to rebel against the war.

Barbara Ehrenreich goes on a venture as a minimum wage employer. During that time, she soon realizes that it is difficult to remain stable in all courses of living with the amount of money she makes. Throughout this experiment she is fully aware that losing her job would not affect her in any way, which gives her the fortune of being able to influence others to speak up and claim for what they deserve. There were hours of draining work to maintain a room over her head, a meal to eat, and health care to fulfill her needs. Above all, at the end of the day, if Ehrenreich would find herself having to live in her car or come to the trail of hunger, she had the advantage of quitting this lifestyle or being able to “cheat” her way out of it.

The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence By: Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman What makes people kill other people? It is a question that has haunted humans for centuries. Authors Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman analyze this in their book The Serial Killers:

O'Brien reacted to the old man's corpse in a very normal way which was in fear. Despite O'Brien being persuaded by his fellow soldiers to greet the body by shaking the hand and talking to it O'brien denies to do it. This demonstrates how O'Brien was still innocent at that moment as it was "too real for (him)" (226).

Death is a destination humans all share; some taking a faster route by choice and others begrudgingly bound to arrive. In war the situations are often kill or be killed. It does not matter who the opponent is because according to Thomas Hardy " curious war is! / You shoot a fellow down / You'd treat if met where any bar is,” (Hardy 17-19). The casualties in The Men He Killed by Thomas Hardy and The Man I Killed by Tim O’Brien depict this situation and the trauma that they embed in the survivors. The traumatic realization of murder had a different impacts on both survivors. While both O’Brien and Hardy speak in a confessional tone, only O'Brien gives traits of himself to the dead man.

I had to do what I had to. I stood over his butchered body waiting patiently for him to take his last breath. When he did, my body involuntarily fell to the ground. The hammer I used as my weapon of choice, the closet thing I could grab after freeing myself from the cage that held me captive since my abduction, hit the ground in unison with my exhausted body. I removed my blindfold, whipped his blood and flesh from my forehead and stood over the lifeless man who stole my most precious gift repeatedly. I never actually saw how he look because of the blindfold he kept on my eyes. I’d see a silhouette of a man about five feet tall often use the phone. He only spoke in Russian so I never knew what he was talking about. I never touched him because my hands were always tied with twine so tight it left permanent marks on my wrist.

The self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức during the Vietnam War is one of the most recognized images from the 20th century. The photo of the burning monk has been circulated throughout thousands of newspapers, and president John F. Kennedy remarked that “no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.” Former U.S. Senator Frank Church, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told the press that "such grisly scenes have not been witnessed since the Christian martyrs marched hand in hand into the Roman arenas." This quote in particular is reflective of the American perception on self-immolation and other types of self-sacrifice, where Christian motifs are used for comparison for how we perceive Quảng Đức’s act. The American perspective is inherently molded by Christian ideals, and if we compare that to Vietnam’s perspective, we find that the two viewpoints are more different that most assume. This project will demonstrate American and Vietnamese perspectives during the Vietnam War on the subject of self-immolation. The self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức is one of the most recognizable images of the war, and it causes a lot of discussion on what the true value of the Vietnam War was for the parties involved. If we can’t answer why the media from the countries involved presented the self-sacrifice of Thích Quảng Đức the way they did, then we can’t understand how the viewpoints from a Christian and non-Christian

“The Child who was Shot Dead by Soldiers in Nyanga” and “Five Ways to Kill a Man” are very different poems but are similar in many ways. Ingrid Jonker and Edwin Brock the writers of these two poems both talk about conflict and how it affects us all in one way or another. In the “The Child” the poem is about a child who was shot dead by soldiers and how his memory lived on affected people after. In “Five Ways to Kill a Man” the poem is about the different conflict there is and alludes to Jesus, medieval conflict, ww1 and the cold war and talks about conflict and the types of conflict. These will make interesting comparisons because they both talk about conflict and the repercussions of conflict. Both talk about the twentieth century and how the legacy of conflict will live on. Both of these poems talk about the idea of Death and the Impact on Society that conflict has also they both talk about Conflict.