Analysis Of The Man I Killed

1053 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Essays on war poems

The Man I Killed, a short story about the traumatic experience of the Vietnam War was written by Tim O’Brien and published in 1990. As a scholar who graduated from Macalester College, O’Brien was drafted into the army to fight in Vietnam, which shattered his plan of continuing his studies. He felt obligated to fight in a war he did not want to participate in. After returning from Vietnam, he began writing to cope with his suffering. In the story, O’Brien depicts how the murder he committed had a profound impact on his life physically and psychologically. He emphasizes his torment by the use of imagery and imagination. His fellow soldiers, Azar and Kiowa, try to ease O’Brien’s misery in order to continue the battle. The story explores the theme
It is vital to understand why O’Brien depicts the dead soldier as “not a Communist”. He does so to show that the dead soldier is not an enemy of his. Both O’Brien and the dead soldier do not belong in the war environment, but feel obligated to fight. O’Brien is completely terrified of the war and the Vietnamese soldier was destined to be a mathematician. O’Brien imagines his own death by putting himself in the Vietnamese soldier’s shoes. But with the same fantasy, he also tortures himself, by imagining exactly why the man’s death might be such a horrible tragedy. O’Brien feeds his guilt by imagining that the man he killed was in the prime of his life. By imagining that the man he killed wrote romantic poems in his journal and had fallen in love with a classmate whom he married before he enlisted as a common rifleman, O’Brien can more easily identify with his victim and understand the terrible nature of the killing. O’Brien also details some of the soldier’s aspirations. O 'Brien creates this fantasy to make the dead man more realistic, causing the reader to think of him as a man, not just a body or an enemy. This is how O 'Brien makes the Vietnam War seem more personal than political. O 'Brien is playing with the notion of truth; the personal history makes the soldier truer to us, and more of a real

Show More
Related

  • Betrayal Exposed in Vietnam Perkasie, By Ehrhart

    1591 Words  | 4 Pages

    The Vietnam War was a controversial conflict that plagued the United States for many years. The loss of life caused by the war was devastating. For those who came back alive, their lives were profoundly changed. The impact the war had on servicemen would affect them for the rest of their lives; each soldier may have only played one small part in the war, but the war played a huge part in their lives. They went in feeling one way, and came home feeling completely different. In the book Vietnam Perkasie, W.D. Ehrhart describes his change from a proud young American Marine to a man filled with immense confusion, anger, and guilt over the atrocities he witnessed and participated in during the war.

    Read More

  • The Man I Killed Rhetorical Analysis Essay

    1796 Words  | 4 Pages

    The Man I Killed focuses on the story of how O'Brien killed a young man. O’Brien could not deal with the act he committed. He imagines an entire life for the dead man and about how he took the dead man away from life. Other members of the troop try and fail to help pull O’Brien out of his depressing thoughts.

    Read More

  • Tim O Brien On The Rainy River Hero's Journey

    1728 Words  | 4 Pages

    Tim O’Brien begins his journey as a young “politically naive” man and has recently graduated out of Macalester College in the United States of America. O’Brien’s plan for the future is steady, but this quickly changes as a call to an adventure ruins his expected path in life. In June of 1968, he receives a draft notice, sharing details about his eventual service in the Vietnam War. He is not against war, but this certain war seemed immoral and insignificant to Tim O’Brien. The “very facts were shrouded in uncertainty”, which indicates that the basis of the war isn’t well known and perceived

    Read More

  • Irony in Tim O’Brien’s How to Tell a True War Story

    2118 Words  | 5 Pages

    An interesting combination of recalled events and editorial commentary, the story is not set up like a traditional short story. One of the most interesting, and perhaps troubling, aspects of the construction of “How to Tell a True War Story” is O’Brien’s choice to create a fictional, first-person narrator who might just as well be the author himself. Because “How to Tell a True War Story” is told from a first-person perspective and O’Brien is an actual Vietnam veteran, a certain authenticity to this story is added. He, as the “expert” of war leads the reader through the story. Since O’Brien has experienced the actual war from a soldier’s point of view, he should be able to present the truth about war...

    Read More

  • The Things They Carried Character Analysis Essay

    1067 Words  | 3 Pages

    O Brien 's point of view is an accurate one as he himself because he is a Vietnam veteran. The title of the short story is meaningful because it describes each soldier’s personality and how he handles conflict within the mind and outside of the body during times of strife. The title fits the life as a soldier perfectly because it shows the reality that war is more than just strategy and attacking of forces. O’Brien narrates the story from two points of view: as the author and the view of the characters. His style keeps the reader informed on both the background of things and the story itself at the same

    Read More

  • Character Comparison in Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"

    556 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • The Brothers K

    560 Words  | 2 Pages

    	The novel illuminates light on the situation not just during the Vietnam era, but also rather throughout all history and the future to come. Throughout mankind’s occupation of earth, we have been plagued by war and the sufferings caused by it. Nearly every generation of people to walk this earth have experienced a great war once in their lifetimes. For instance, Vietnam for my father’s generation, World War 2 for my grandfather’s, and World War 1 for my great-grandfather’s. War has become an unavoidable factor of life. Looking through history and toward the future, I grow concerned over the war that will plague my generation, for it might be the last war.

    Read More

  • Coping with the Reality of Death Depicted in Tim O'Brien's Novel, The Things They Carried

    844 Words  | 2 Pages

    "War is hell . . . war is mystery terror and adventure and courage and discovery and despair and . . . war is nasty (80)." When it all happened it was not like "a movie you aren't a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait (211)." O'Brien and the rest of the solders were just ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations. They needed to tell blatant lies" to "bring the body and soul back together (239)." They needed to eliminate the reality of death. As ordinary people they were not capable of dealing with the engulfing realities of death and war therefore they needed to create coping skills. O'Brien approaches the loss of his childhood friend, Linda, in the same way he approaches the loss of his comrades in the war as this is the only way he knows how to deal with death. A skill he learned, and needed, in the Vietnam War.

    Read More

  • O'Brien's Things They Carried Essay: Experiences and Emotions

    1608 Words  | 4 Pages

    The violent nature that the soldiers acquired during their tour in Vietnam is one of O'Brien's predominant themes in his novel. By consciously selecting very descriptive details that reveal the drastic change in manner within the men, O'Brien creates within the reader an understanding of the effects of war on its participants. One of the soldiers, "Norman Bowler, otherwise a very gentle person, carried a thumb. . The thumb was dark brown, rubbery to touch. . . It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen"(O'Brien 13).

    Read More

  • Psychoanalytic Perspective In The Things They Carried

    1396 Words  | 3 Pages

    O’Brien’s unique verisimilitude writing style fills the novel with deep meaning and emotion. Analyzing the novel through a psychological lens only adds to its allure. Understanding why characters act the way they do helps bring this novel to life. The reader begins to empathize with the characters. Every day, the soldiers’ lives hang in the balance. How these soldiers react to life-threatening situations will inspire the reader. Life has an expiration date. Reading about people who are held captive by their minds and who die in the name of war, will inspire the reader to live everyday as if they are currently in the

    Read More

  • The Elusiveness of War and the Tenuousness of Morality in Tim O?Brien?s ?The Things They Carried,? ?How to Tell a True War Story,? and ?Style?

    636 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien demonstrates how exposure to the atrocities of nations at war leads to the soldiers having skewed perspectives on what is right and wrong, predominantly at times when the purpose of the war itself appears elusive. The ambiguity that consumes the stories of “The Things They Carried” and “How to Tell a True War Story” is displayed with irony, for the ‘moral’ of such war stories is that there is no moral at all. O’Brien portrays the character Mitchell Sanders as an observer who seeks the morals to be found through the war fatalities; however, he depicts these morals in a manner that actually stresses the impiety of the situations above all else. The characters in this novel are at the forefront of the Vietnam War, thus blinded by carnage that soon begins to obscure any prior notions held about what is moralistic and what is not.

    Read More

  • On the Rainy River

    1075 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Vietnam War was a conflict that many people did not comprehend. In fact, the war was atrocious and bloody. According to The Vietnam War: a History in Documents, 58,000 US soldier died and more than 700,000 came back with physical and emotional marks (Young, Fitzgerald & Grunfeld 147). For many Americans this war was meaningless. In the same way, O’Brien admits, “American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong; certain blood was being shed for uncertain reason” (40). O’Brien believes the war was not significance. Furthermore, the lack of logic in the matter makes him confused about going to war. That’s why, he does not understand why he was sent to fight a war for which causes and effects were uncertain. The author continues by saying, “I was too good for...

    Read More

  • The Man I Killed, By Tim O’Brien

    1200 Words  | 3 Pages

    Usually when someone is murdered, people expect the murderer to feel culpable. This though, is not the case in war. When in war, a soldier is taught that the enemy deserves to die, for no other reason than that they are the nation’s enemy. When Tim O’Brien kills a man during the Vietnam War, he is shocked that the man is not the buff, wicked, and terrifying enemy he was expecting. This realization overwhelms him in guilt. O’Brien’s guilt has him so fixated on the life of his victim that his own presence in the story—as protagonist and narrator—fades to the black. Since he doesn’t use the first person to explain his guilt and confusion, he negotiates his feelings by operating in fantasy—by imagining an entire life for his victim, from his boyhood and his family to his feeling about the war and about the Americans. In The Man I Killed, Tim O’Brien explores the truth of The Vietnam War by vividly describing the dead body and the imagined life of the man he has killed to question the morality of killing in a war that seems to have no point to him.

    Read More

  • The Man I Killed

    832 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the novel, The Things They Carried, the chapter The Man I Killed tells the story of a main character Tim who killed a Viet Cong solider during the Vietnam War. The author Tim O’Brien, describes himself as feeling instantaneously remorseful and dealing with a sense of guilt. O’Brien continues to use various techniques, such as point of view, repetition, and setting, to delineate the abundant amount of guilt and remorse Tim is feeling.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Making A Murderer

    2325 Words  | 5 Pages

    “We can all say we’re never going to commit a crime, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be accused.” The trailer of Netflix’s series, Making a Murderer, begins with this statement. Before viewers have even begun watching the series, this quote prods them to go down a scary thought path. Where would you find the strength to stay hopeful while in jail? How would you prove your innocence? Would you succumb to the pressure of pleading guilty for the chance of early parole? The first seven seconds of the trailer captures the viewers’ attention, and from there they are hooked. Netflix creates the infamous good vs. evil scenario in this series. Steven Avery and his family are portrayed as the poor and innocent citizens, while the investigators and prosecutors

    Read More

More about Analysis Of The Man I Killed

Open Document