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The man i killed analysis
The man i killed analysis
A man i killed analysis
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The man I Killed
What is peace and how can we achieve it? Since our existence on earth, we humans have used lies, manipulation, corruption, and war to achieve short lasting peace. We have fought and killed, sinned and committed unforgivable crimes, that we can’t repent. But we still use these as “solution tools” to create peace, that only one party can experience while the other party experiences sorrow and pain. But on the other side of the coin, the one side who achieved peace will experience a tremendous loss, many soldiers will be dead, some will regret their actions, and some of them will develop PTSD or Shell shock. This is exactly what the story “The Man I Killed” by Tom O’Brien is about. Where the main character O’ Brien kills a young boy and begins to feel remorse.
The story is told through a first-person narrator. From the protagonist O’Brien’s point of view instead of the narrator himself. Where we get access to the protagonist’s thoughts and emotions, based on dialog, actions and thought. The first-person narrator is personal because of the frequent use of “I, the narrator only chooses what to show or tell the reader. This story doesn’t contain narrative comments.
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His age is unknown, but we can presume that he is about 20 years-old and from The United States. He Is a flat character because he doesn’t change throughout the story. His appearance isn’t described either. Throughout the story, he makes up and shapes the dead Vietnamese soldier’s life and the condition of the corpse. “He had been born, maybe, in 1946 in the village of My Khe near the central coastline of Quang Ngai Province…” page (1. Ll. 21-23), “ His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone…” page (1. Ll. 1). When Tim met the Vietnamese Solider, on the battlefield, they both knew that only one could survive. As Tim talks about his life we get the feeling that their lives are the
...f his stay in Vietnam, he had wished he had never heard that word. He became horrified by this war. The once proud American was no longer so proud of his country. The Vietnam War was not like the movies he saw as a child; “the screams were real, and when men fell down they didn’t get up, and the sticky wet substance splattering against your leg was somebody’s intestines” (Ehrhart, 246). Although he had his family and friends around him upon his return home, it seemed that Ehrhart was alone in “The World.” Unless someone was there, they could not possibly understand the thoughts and memories he had to live with. The gruesome memories from Vietnam had permeated him completely; they engraved into his mind and would undoubtedly scar him forever.
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 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).
The Murderers Are Among Us, directed by Wolfe Gang Staudte, is the first postwar film. The film takes place in Berlin right after the war. Susan Wallner, a young women who has returned from a concentration camp, goes to her old apartment to find Hans Mertens living there. Hans took up there after returning home from war and finding out his house was destroyed. Hans would not leave, even after Susan returned home. Later on in the film we find out Hans was a former surgeon but can no longer deal with human suffering because of his traumatic experience in war. We find out about this traumatic experience when Ferdinand Bruckner comes into the film. Bruckner, Hans’ former captain, was responsible for killing hundreds
Tim is a well educated graduating student from Macalester College and a man who sometimes gets sidetracked with his own fantasy world presented in the first paragraph “Tim O’Brien: a secret hero. The Lone Ranger. If the stakes ever become high enough-if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough-I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years” which shows how individualistic Tim is and his wishes to be able to control his courage which he later explains “offered hope and grace”. Tim is a self-confident character, but imagining himself going to war is not in his best interest as he holds himself to the highest standard stating “I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldn’t happen. I was above it.”. Tim had experienced the outdoors and despised of it; he loved his studies and the thought of him receiving scholarships to further educate himself motivated him even more. One of the most compelling evidence that causes Tim to change his mind is when Tim is on a fishing boat with Elroy and Tim begins to see an illusion of his family, friends, his past teachers and others that have been involved in his life. Such an event caused a dramatic change in Tim as gives up his hope of going to Canada and states “And right then I submitted. I would go to war-I would kill and maybe die-because I was embarrassed not to.”. Ultimately, Tim’s decision of heading to war was meat because of his family and friends little did he know of the regret this decision would cause
Tim O'Brien uses imagery to show the perpetuation of the traumatic war memories. After accidentally killing a new soldier, Tim describes the deceased soldier.“He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay with one leg bent beneath him, his jaw in his throat, his face neither expressive nor
The “Man I Killed” takes us into the Vietnam War and tell us about a soldiers first time of killing another individual. The author describes a Viet Cong soldier that he has killed, using vivid, physical detail with clear descriptions of the dead mans’ fatal wounds. O'Brien envisions the biography of this man and envisions the individual history of the dead Vietnamese soldier starting with his birthplace moving through his life, and finished with him enrolling in the Vietnamese Army. O'Brien also describes some of the dead soldiers’ hopes and dreams. The author uses this history in an attempt to make the dead man more realistic to the reader
Throughout the novel, Tim O’Brien illustrates the extreme changes that the soldiers went through. Tim O’Brien makes it apparent that although Vietnam stole the life of millions through the death, but also through the part of the person that died in the war. For Tim O’Brien, Rat Kiley, Mary Anne and Norman Bowker, Vietnam altered their being and changed what the world knew them as, into what the world could not understand.
Similar to first person is the limited omniscient point of view in that the narrator
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.
The three character perspectives on war are interpreted entirely differently. Tim O’Brien is illustrated as the most sensitive soldier out of the three. “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole.” (124). Tim’s sensitivity is revealed when he shows how bewildered he is as he stares at the lifeless Viet Cong body.
Since the story was written in the third person objective, it is easier for the reader to remain objective while analyzing the story. If we one were to hear the story from on of the character’s point of view, the retelling of the story would be clouded with various em...
Tim O'Brien is a portrayed as a scared soldier who did not want to go to the war when he was drafted at first, but he ends up going in order to disregard the embarrassment. Tim first experiences a sense of isolation when he is talking with Mitchell Sanders, a soldier in the same platoon as Tim, about Bobby Jorgenson the new medic. Tim O'Brien plans to for not treating him for shock after Tim gets shot in the butt. He did not receive the response he thought he would have received from his friend, Mitchell. "People change. Situations change. I hate to say this, man, but you're out of touch. Jorgeson---he's with us now" (188). Tim O'Brien feels a sense of loss when Mitchell tells him that he is not as tight with the group as he was before getting his wound treated. In a way O'Brien feels that his peers do not want him around because he does not like the new medic, but everyone else finds the medic to be a good guy. Mitchell and the other soldiers of the platoon consider Bobby Jorgenson as apart of the group without Tim . "I felt something inside me. It was anger, partly, but it was also a sense of pure and total loss: I didn't fit anymore. They were soldiers, I wasn't (188). After Tim O'Brien hears what Mitchell Sanders had to say, he no longer considers himself as a soldier and feels somewhat out of place. Tim O'Brien experiences a great deal of isolation towards the end of the war and does not like the person he
The story is told most of the time by the narrator who narrates the story of Man and Boy and the other characters that they meet. However, the storytelling also shifts to the Man’s point of view in many occasions, in which the thoughts of the Man are expressed for others to know. The film does an excellent way of telling the story through the point of view of the Man, because it shows how much the struggle of survival can be very tiring to a person’s mental state. In addition, the flashbacks that are shown in the film are from the Man’s thoughts, but are told in a third person point of view. Therefore, the story is told mostly in third person omniscient in both the novel and film
Evidence of professionalism on the part of the two killers, Al and Max, is that they both wear a uniform? They wear overcoats. that are too tight for them, gloves to prevent finger prints, and Derby hats. This might be for intimidation, to suggest they are. gangsters or something similar, or it could be that they are not so.