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Analysis Of The Man I Killed 'By Tim O' Brien

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In the story “The Man I Killed” the story focuses on the thought of what the Vietnamese character could have been. Tim O’Brien dreams up a scenario that the character could have been just like him. This section of the book shows how much the author cares about humanity he dreams up this character to be a person like him, a boy with various dreams and a family struggling through for independence. When Kiowa tried to comfort him by saying “All right, let me ask a question,” “You want to trade places with him? Turn it all upside down-you want that? I mean, be honest.” Tim is caught up on the idea that, it could have easily have been him. The idea of that vietnamese boy dying in front of him brings fear that it could have been him and or anyone
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In the midst of evil, you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted.” (p.77) The author also suggests that the characters in this story had to choose a way of living or a cultural identity instead of taking elements from the Vietnamese culture and blending them in a comfortable way to live in. Most notably, the two chapters differ in the themes explored and in the position that the author assumes.

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In the chapter when he describes the man he kills, he talks about the state of the dead body by saying, “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…the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him” (O’Brien Chapter 11). This brutal and horrifying imagery displays an irrefutable element of truth to O’Brien’s writing. Not only does this imagery highlight the truth to his writing, but it also sheds light on the brutal truth about the war in Vietnam. By using imagery as such a strong rhetorical device in his writing, he gives the average person a taste of just how barbaric and cruel Vietnam felt for the people who experience the war first hand on either side of the fighting. Tim O’Brien gives a very detailed and intense description of his time fighting in Vietnam during their war with America.

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Answering the call to serve causes enough moral conflict and killing for the war only adds to it. Tim O’Brien struggles to make sense of his thoughts after killing a Vietnamese man while outside of My Khe. O’Brien writes “The Man I Killed” detailing how the man’s disfigured appearance looks repetitively, and dreaming about what the man’s life must of been like before his death. Afterwards O’Brien reflects saying, “It was entirely automatic. I did not hate the young man; I did not see him as the enemy…”

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