Remorse In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

Remorse, meaning a deep regret or guilt for a wrong committed, is a funny thing. It can mess with your mind and eat you alive, so you never forget the memory. It can make you do things, like write a story, to help you get rid of it. Get rid of those feelings that you can’t express or face. The chapter "The Man I Killed" in the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, is exactly what O’Brien does to eliminate the feeling of dread and sorrow. O’Brien talks about the death of a young man with skinny wrists, skinny ankles, and a star-shaped hole in his eye. He gives him life by making him into a story, so that way he could be distracted by the fact that the young boy won’t be able to read it. He wrote this chapter to express his remorse, guilt, and shame for the boy that lost his life in front of O’Brien’s eyes, whether the death was by his hand or not. Although the title of this chapter, The Man I Killed, is about a man who died, it is unclear if O'Brien killed anyone in the war.
Remorse can be described as a distressing emotion experienced by someone who regrets their actions which they have

O’Brien shows his guilt of the death by constantly going over how he died and how he looked when he died in the chapter O’Brien constantly states that the man has skinny wrists, skinny ankles, a star-shaped hole where his eye should be, and how his jaw was down in his throat. The repetition of the way the boy looks shows the sense of failure that O’Brien feels for not helping we’re not saving the boy, even if it was him that was killed. This guilt can also be seen by the way he doesn’t respond when Qiuwa talks to him and says that it is his fault and how he tries to get him up and moving again. How O’Brien tells the story that the boy might have lived also shows guilt about how the boy died too young and how he had a life ahead of