ipl-logo

Denial Of Death In Tim O Brian's The Lives Of The Dead

1131 Words5 Pages

When a loved one dies, it can be difficult to cope with the loss. The loss can be overwhelmingly devastating which results in the desperate desire to connect with the person who has died. To compensate, people often insist on keeping the loved one’s spirit with them through memory. However, oftentimes the death is so unimaginable and the impact so great, it results in the denial of death and the subsequent altering of these memories. Denial of death undermines memory by fabricating understanding of events, and in Tim O’Brian’s “The Lives of The Dead,” Tim’s memories of a childhood crush Linda, demonstrate his denial through his altered visual, auditory, and emotional memories.
Even after a loved one passes away, people can still feel connected …show more content…

Tim engages in this behaviour when he talks to Linda about her experiences in the afterlife, while he is having dreams in which Linda is still physically there. He repeatedly inquires about how it feels to be dead. Linda’s answers are always insightful. For example she replies, ‘“Once you’re alive [...] you can’t ever be dead.” Or she’d say: “Do I look dead?”” (244) This quote reveals that given how hard it is for Tim to deal with the loss, he wants to make sure Linda feels safe and content. Tim's visions of Linda are distorted because they serve as a way for him to cope with his guilt and regret over not being able to save her. Throughout the story, Tim blames himself for not being able to do more for Linda, even though he was only a child at the time. His visions of Linda serve as a way for him to imagine a reality where he was able to save her, and where she is happy and healthy. Although auditory memories are frequent in mourners, they can also be a sign of denial. These discussions invariably end with the deceased person persuading the bereaved that they are doing well, despite the fact that there is no way to verify this and the situation is ultimately made up. Tim’s subconscious is confirming that Linda is safe. He is asking her these questions to provide him with closure. Thus, Tim's visions of Linda can be seen as distorted into something that was not reality because they were a product of his imagination and memories rather than an accurate representation of who Linda was. His visions serve as a way for him to cope with his guilt and regret over not being able to save her, and as a way for him to cling to his childhood innocence, denying her inevitable

Show More
Related
753 Words | 4 Pages

When a person dies, we lose that support. Everyone has evolved with this type of need for other. The idea of loss and not being anymore

Read More
1132 Words | 5 Pages

The boy's thoughts seem to symbolize the idea that if their father comes back everything would be the way it used to be before. Further supporting the idea that the Father is a symbol of stability for the family. Through the girl's dreams, and the boy's memories the

Read More
665 Words | 3 Pages

Tim however, brought them alive in his dreams or in his stories. Everyone wants some happiness in their life. ‘“At one point, I remember, they sat the body up against a fence." ’ “They proposed toasts. They lifted their canteens and drank to the old man's family and ancestors, his many grandchildren, his newfound life

Read More
909 Words | 4 Pages

This situation leads to the death of the John Doe, guilt building up within her, and causing her to have the dream of the victim. The dream gave her a chance to help John Doe, to possibly

Read More
1784 Words | 8 Pages

This was the case for Cortney whose injuries were so severe that it took months before he was even able to begin processing the physiological harms that he had experienced as well as those that would come even after he had begun to recover and started to learn new information about the crime that upset his entire world. This speaks to another thing that I learned, which was the importance of information to the recovery of victims. For example, as much as Cortney wanted to deny that his mother had died, it was critical to his recovery that he was provided with evidence that she was actually dead so that he could work on processing that reality as part of his recovery. When he was taken to her grave and he finally understood that she was gone, it fostered new emotions that he needed to work out, including his desire to see his mother’s murderers “get killed too” (Kinder, 1982, p.

Read More
655 Words | 3 Pages

Death is an inevitable part of the life cycle. To bring those who are gone back to life, people must recreate their memories with the deceased through storytelling. In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien shows that when someone experiences a loss, by telling stories of the lost one it will keep them alive through the mind and help one cope with them being gone. In the first chapter, The Things They Carried, O’Brien demonstrates the theme of telling stories to cope with death by how the platoon members talk about Ted Lavender’s death, “Like cement, Kiowa whispered in the dark.

Read More
1980 Words | 8 Pages

By saying that “Nana Upstairs won’t be here anymore” (DePaola, 1998, p. 16), Tommy might interpret that his great-grandmother simply moved away to live somewhere else, which would confuse him, as well as the young readers. Something that could have enhanced Tommy’s understanding of the irreversible nature of death would have been Speece and Brent’s concept of non-functionality. Also understood by the age of seven, non-functionality describes the fact that bodily functions cease after death (Arnold, 2017, p. 8). Tommy’s mother could have told

Read More
1386 Words | 6 Pages

I have always had a certain attachment to memories regardless of whether the person is in my life or not. So when my grandmother passed in the summer and my mother got diagnosed with breast cancer a few years ago, I did know how to feel since they were both a priceless part of my life and upbringing. I had not seen my grandmother in 5 years because she was living in India and had not known she was sick until one day my mom finally told me. I felt the biggest rush of emotions hitting me at once. My grandma had raised me and only my mother was able to go to India and see her before she passed and attend the funeral.

Read More
583 Words | 3 Pages

She dies at the age of nine due to a brain tumor. Her role is to give O’Brien a reason to write stories: to immortalize the dead. Those who die can be revitalized through storytelling. Linda is the prime example of O’Brien’s belief that storytelling aids the healing process of pain, confusion, and sadness that comes with an unexpected death. After she dies, he uses his imagination to bring her back to life, depicting that the dead can still be alive through literature.

Read More
1222 Words | 5 Pages

In “Lives of the Dead'', O’Brien tells the story of Linda to compare the death of a young girl to the death of young soldiers. The narrator starts the chapter off by stating that “stories can save us” (213), which relates to how stories help soldiers cope. The narrator is telling readers how important storytelling actually is. This idea is continued later on in the chapter, when the narrator was reflecting on his childhood crush and how he “wanted to let her know how [he] felt” (217). This connects to previous chapters and how soldiers tell stories to communicate their real feelings to people.

Read More
495 Words | 2 Pages

But nobody knows what’s going on inside the preparation room, all they see is their deceased relative, good as new, when they walk by the open casket during the funeral. Mitford depicts the American funeral industry’s manipulation of death throughout the essay with either blatant or thinly-veiled verbal irony. In the last paragraph, Mitford states that the funeral director has put on a “well-oiled performance" where "the concept of death played no part whatsoever”, unless providing it was “inconsiderately mentioned” by the funeral conductors. This is extremely ironic because a funeral is supposed to revolved around death, and this makes us think about funerals and the embalmment process in a way that we usually don’t. These processes takes away the cruelty and brutality of death and make it seem trivial while making our deceased relatives life-like, with pink toned skin and a smile on their face, and death is not like that at all.

Read More
648 Words | 3 Pages

Having visions can be dangerous for your mental health. The character Ishmael Beah has to experiences of visions throughout the story A Long Way Gone. He experiences a vision in the hospital while recovering but after he experienced his vision he didn’t give up. He kept to his goals with

Read More
706 Words | 3 Pages

Obrien keeps the deceased characters Linda, Kiowa, Ted Lavender, Curt and Timmy alive, through his memories, dreams and stories. In Tim O’Brien’s “Lives of the Dead,” the loss of innocence and the power of literacy are both prevalent themes. Symbols are often used in a story to mean more than its literary meaning; Linda’s red cap, in “Lives of the Dead,” is a symbol of innocence’s. Linda’s innocence affected neither her illness nor death. Linda was O’Brien’s childhood girlfriend; when she first found out she was sick and had cancer, she began to wear a red cap, every day.

Read More
1504 Words | 7 Pages

Magical thinking is the anthropological idea that if one performs the right actions, or hopes enough for something, their desired outcome will happen. The concept of “magical thinking” is one of the central ideas discussed in Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. This memoir explores the grief experienced by the author after losing her husband of nearly forty years. In no way does Didion try to approach death poetically, but rather honestly and practically. She bravely discusses the universal, yet rarely talked about, aspects of death, such as self pity, regret, isolation, secretly going crazy, and the phenomenon she describes as “magical thinking.”

Read More
1774 Words | 8 Pages

The attitudes to grief over the loss of a loved one are presented in two thoroughly different ways in the two poems of ‘Funeral Blues’ and ‘Remember’. Some differences include the tone towards death as ‘Funeral Blues’ was written with a more mocking, sarcastic tone towards death and grieving the loss of a loved one, (even though it was later interpreted as a genuine expression of grief after the movie “Four Weddings and a Funeral” in 1994), whereas ‘Remember’ has a more sincere and heartfelt tone towards death. In addition, ‘Funeral Blues’ is entirely negative towards death not only forbidding themselves from moving on but also forbidding the world from moving on after the tragic passing of the loved one, whilst ‘Remember’ gives the griever

Read More

More about Denial Of Death In Tim O Brian's The Lives Of The Dead

Related Topics

Open Document