Kiowa's Death In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

It was Kiowa-he knew that. The sound was ragged and clotted up, but even so he knew the voice. A strange gargling sound”. O’Brien creates tension between communication and death in this instance by showing that even if the men were to follow Kiowa’s lead and open themselves up to each other, they still would not be able to rationalize the war. The men all come up with different reasons for Kiowa’s death. The narrator blames the fact that he did open up to Kiowa by showing him a picture of his girlfriend, “Like murder, the boy thought. The flashlight made it happen. Dumb and dangerous. And as a result his friend Kiowa was dead”. While the flashlight could have been seen across the field, we can trust that it was not a direct cause for Kiowa’s

After the death of Curt Lemon, Rat Kiely fails to express his emotions and releases tension through violence. When the baby buffalo, a cultural symbol of Vietnam, refuses to accept Kiely’s advances, Kiely immediately resorts to shooting the animal with the goal of prolonging it’s suffering. O’Brien writes the scene to reflect the tension, “He put the muzzle right up to the mouth and shot the mouth away. Nobody said much”, The focus on Kiely’s aim towards its mouth shows his own need for communication and his continued attack mirrors how Lemon’s body was completely torn apart. In her essay “Truth and Fiction in Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone and The Things They Carried”, Marilyn Wesley connects Lemon’s death and Kiely’s violent choices, “The horrific aattack on the body of the animal mimics his friend’s fragmentation and evisceration. The biblical motto of vengeance, ‘an eye for an eye’, is literally enacted in a narrative sequence meant to inscribe the sense of just retribution”. In order to gain a sense of control, Kiely take his feelings out through violence. There is no way to rationalize his reaction, just as there is no way to rationalize Lemons death, and the other men have no way to say that it was either right or wrong. He can’t tell the other men because they are all carrying their own trauma, “They were tough. They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing – these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight”. It wouldn’t be fair to make the other soldiers carry his suffering along with their own. Therefore, he takes it out on the animal, trying make it understand his pain without words. However, the violence is only a temporary solution, “Rat Kiley was crying. He tried to say something, but then cradled his