Summary Of The Man I Killed

“The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed” (O’Brien 68). In Tim O'Brien's’ novel, The Things They Carried, the author creates an overall reflection of war and the memories that come from the experiences. O’Brien describes his experiences in the Vietnam War and how the outcomes can lead to PTSD. Soldiers can not possibly capture these experiences in literal truth, but by storytelling. Tim kills an enemy and feels the guilt from it, so he makes up a backstory for

In the beginning of the story we are introduced to the dead soldier named Kiowa. Kiowa was a native American, which in this story is ironic because he died for a country that didn’t socially accept his cultural background but there he was fighting a war that was unnecessary for them to be fighting. However, as readers we picture Kiowa as a model citizen because Jimmy Cross said, “what a fine soldier Kiowa has been, what a fine human being, and how he was the kind of son that any father could be proud of forever,” (O’Brien 3176). This passage shows the reader that Jimmy Cross thought highly of Kiowa and that it was a great lost to his platoon. Not only that but O’Brien also wanted to highlight Kiowa’s innocence and show that the Vietnam war was stripping our youth of their innocence’s. However, it’s not until Jimmy Cross says, “he should’ve taken one look and headed for higher ground. He should’ve known. No excuses” (O’Brien 3178), that we could see that Jimmy Cross felt that Kiowa death was his fault and that it was a loss of a good

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

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien uses the art of fabricating stories as a coping mechanism. Trying to distinguish the difference between fictional and factual stories is a challenge in this book, but literal truth cannot capture the real violence that the soldiers dealt with in Vietnam, only “story truth” can. He explains, “If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made victim of a very old and terrible lie.” (O’Brien 65). The novel illustrates that storytelling is a way to keep the dead alive, even if it may not be a true story.

Sometimes, however, no matter how much a soldier tried to find escapes for himself, obstacles would come in their way and force men to find other means of coping with reality. Many times this extra stress would come after a soldier killed someone, and felt overwhelming guilt for taking another human life. In The Things they Carried, there are not thousands of examples of this form of death, but we are made aware of one specific story. O 'Brien tells us about the man he killed, and the difficulty in releasing his guilt in this matter. He more than once describes the man in great detail, almost attempting to clear the event out of his mind even though he claims he "did not look on [his] work as therapy" (139, 179). This is a time when the best coping mechanism the men have is time and open ears. As they drag Tim away from the scene after giving him a few minutes to accept and process the death, Kiowa urges to "talk" (144). This is the only way he can

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.

The men who were in Tim O’Brien’s platoon caught on quickly, if they talked about everything that was going on as if it was only a story, their lives became a little easier. It became easier even for the men who didn’t practically like the guy who died. In the war it wasn’t about liking one another, that didn’t matter, what mattered to them was expressing their grief without showing it. “In any case, it’s easy to get sentimental about the dead, and to guard against it” (82). Being able to guard against their grief was something that was hard for many. No matter how many stories they told, there was still a sadness that some of them never could get over. The death of Kiowa was one of those impossible to get over. His death impacted everyone in the platoon. Even though Kiowa was just their guide, they treated him like he was a part of their family of misfits. Every man in the platoon had a story for Kiowa. There was some who told people stories that had Kiowa never dying, there were two however where his death left such a huge impact on them. All they

Writing provides authors a platform to create their own reality. Critically acclaimed author, Tim O’Brien supports this notion through his novel The Things They Carried in which he blurs the line between truth and fiction to depict its necessity when storytelling about experiences at war. O’Brien specifically includes the chapter “Ambush” with the purpose of expressing the abrupt flood of emotions soldiers experience in war through the personal story of him killing someone at war. He adopts a compelling tone throughout, through the use of rhetorical strategies juxtaposition, diction, and imagery in order to convey how a clout of one’s innocence can lead to them engaging in regrettable actions, influenced by the violence of war.

To kill a man is to take away everything he has, and ever will have; and in War, death is inescapable. Vietnam War veteran Tim O’Brien was drafted to fight in the War in 1969 and states in the book as his “character/narrator” self that he attempted an escape to Canada out of fear. But the stronger fear of people being ashamed of him took over and had him turning back to home to enlist in the U.S. Army. O’Brien published The Things They Carried in 1990 and explored the physical and mental realms of war-time combat with stories. These stories are based on his own experiences, but they include a fictionalized version of himself as “the narrator” and are said to only be what felt like the truth rather than being the actual truth. Despite this, the intention of these stories are to give readers the understanding of what it was like to be a soldier fighting for their life and country overseas. In the chapter “The Man I Killed”, the narrator tells the story of a man he killed outside the village of My Khe who was “a citizen and a soldier” of Vietnam (119). Although this man was the enemy, O’Brien’s character displays how ending another’s life in battle is not an easy pill to swallow. O’Brien, the narrator, uses repetitive descriptions, vivid and gory details, and his glum emotional response to the fatality he caused in the chapter to illustrate how feeling responsible for another man’s death can have traumatic effects on the mind.

For more than twenty years, O’Brien “had to live with it, feeling the shame, trying to push it away, and so by this act of remembrance, by putting the facts down on paper, I'm hoping to relieve at least some of the pressure on my dreams" (O’Brien 37). Twenty years is a long time to suffer from the feeling of shame. Despite O’Brien’s attempts to reflect on stories that happened to him down on paper, he only hopes to alleviate his feeling of shame instead of stopping it because he understands that feeling of shame would not easily to be ceased. After the Vietnam War, tormented by the fact that Norman Bowker himself had not be able to save Kiowa from Kiowa’s death, he keeps playing past events in his mind, and he “followed the tar road on its seven-mile loop around the lake then he started all over again, driving slowly, feeling safe inside his father’s big Chevy” (O’Brien 131). He repeatedly drives around the lake because he does not know how to ease his feeling of embarrassment.

Towards the end of the chapter, thoughts race through his mind about what kind of life he has just put to and end, Kiowa, a fellow soldier, continues trying to communicate with him. Kiowa’s attempts, however, are so short far apart that they almost become easy to forget while reading the long paragraphs of description between them. In addition to this, O’Brien does not react to him at all: “‘you okay?’ Kiowa said. The corpse lay almost entirely in shade” (123). Every time Kiowa interjects, O’Brien just launches directly back into his own thoughts, creating disconnect between Kiowa and the rest of the story. This pattern continues, always reintroducing Kiowa every time he speaks, until almost the end of the chapter: “Then he said, ‘Man, I’m sorry.’ Then later he said, ‘why not talk about it?’ Then he said, ‘Come on, man, talk.’ [The man I killed] was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty” (124). The repetition of “then he said” and its variations even right next to each other provides an insight into how O’Brien sees the whole experience. He sees that Kiowa is there, sure, but it’s nothing more than an outlying, forgettable detail hidden behind his thoughts of the man he has killed. No matter how many times Kiowa talks to him, he always goes back to his thoughts of guilt

Tim O’Brien depicts some of the effects it has on them, as well as some coping mechanisms they use, in The Things they Carried. Some of the things the soldiers lose include their innocence and a few of their fellow soldiers. Everyone was affected by this differently, some felt guilt, others just pretended things were fine, or dreamt them back to life. The reactions of those experiencing loss also help define it and how powerful it can be. When Kiowa died, one of the boys felt the effects of immediate loss, leading him to believe he was to blame for his death. He felt that “he was alone. He’d lost everything. He’d lost Kiowa and his weapon and his flashlight and his girlfriend’s picture. He remembered this. He remembered wondering if he could lose himself” (O’Brien 171). Like him, many people feel very lost during hard times and question how much longer they can stay sane and handle the situation. In some unfortunate cases, when loss becomes too much, some commit suicide, or react violently. However, an alternate way of coping with loss (of lives and of sanity) that is seen in the novel is to completely ignore it. O’Brien recalls how “in Vietnam, too, [they] always had ways of making the dead seem not so dead. Shaking hands, that was one way. By slighting death, by acting, [they] pretended it was not the terrible thing it was…” (O’Brien 238). The thoughts of one of the characters portrays how much everyone

When O’Brien kills a ‘Viet Cong’ soldier and is immediately fulfilled with remorse. O’Brien goes into a daze and he can’t stop staring at the body of the man he killed. Because he was so bewildered at what just happened his friend Kiowa says “Tim, its a war. The guy wasn't Heidi-he had a weapon, right? Its a though thing, for sure, but you got to cut out that staring.”(O’Brien, 120) Tim’s friend Kiowa saw his distress, and tried to comfort him as well as he could. Kiowa was not only trying to get Tim together for the sake of his mental health, but also so he gets focused so he doesn't get hurt. This shows how support from friends are essential in times of tragedy in

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.

O’Brien uses point of view to convey his feelings of remorse in order to show that war is traumatizing. He is the most sensitive to the situation. "The star-shaped hole was red and yellow. The yellow part seemed to be getting wider, spreading out at the center of the star (pg. 126)." O'Brien allows the readers to see that he has remorse about how he took action to stop the Vietnamese soldier as he thinks repetitively about the attack. Additionally, he is also shown as the character that observes and rarely really talks, signifying guilt and shame. Azar is a little more brash and insensitive towards O’Brien’s reaction to the kill. “Oh, man, you fuckin’ trashed the fucker” (125). Azar is the soldier that is there to complete the mission and does