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The Man I Killed Critical Analysis

1061 Words5 Pages

Brooke Lynch
Advanced English 3
Working Draft 2
05 March 2018

Psychological Burdens Soldiers Have During and After War
The themes of shame and guilt is constant through this book. Soldiers had feelings of obligation to go to war. While there were many reasons, the most prevalent was the fear of embarrassing either themselves, their parents and family members, or the town they lived in. Running from the draft or not going could make all those around them ashamed of their actions, or embarrassed of associating with them. Even social obligation had an impact on the shame and guilt piled on the individual man. Many of the men in O’Brien’s stories had a pressure to fulfill their obligations as citizens and soldiers because it was their ‘duty.’ …show more content…

In “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien threw a grenade into the path of an unknown man. This obviously killed him. Although he did not know him, O’Brien attempts to bring that man back to life by creating a history and future for that man in detail. A story for the life of the man that he had ended so quickly. After watching his friends and fellow soldiers die one after another, the guilt causes him to see that the man he killed is a man just like himself, and everyone else. It forces O’Brien to truly see what he is doing. The life of the man being taken is similar to the death of Lavender. Both men died to the hands of an enemy soldier who will never know them. Where their lives were taken without knowing their past, or their future. He sees how he has taken countless lives without thought. This realization causes him to live with that very guilt that Jimmy Cross lives with - for the rest of his life, and for the rest of O’Brien’s. This is something he had not felt in the context of the war zone he was …show more content…

It had not been their plan or their goal. Yet there was no escape from it. O’Brien tried to run to Canada, yet his feelings of guilt brought him back. He came back not because he wanted to, but because he had to. If he had the choice, he never would have gone to Vietnam or be in the army. The same was true for most of the men around him. The hell that they were in blurred the concepts of right and wrong. Every man there had been sent to fight a war they had no qualm in. The grenade that O’Brien threw to kill the unknown man, killed a piece of himself

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O’Brien confuses the text ,when he talks about “the man I killed” with an image of himself being the killer, but later in the chapter a mention telling the man to “run” but the grenade blows up before he could say run. The man dead did not affect him at the moment it

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Have you ever felt ashamed of doing the right thing? In The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, narrator Tim O’Brien battles the differences of doing the right thing because he wants to do it or because he was a coward. O’Brien’s shame and guilt associated with the vietnam war influenced his decision to fight or flight. Tim O’Brien was drafted to fight in a war he doesn’t believe in. His principles were telling him to run away from the war, but he was too ashamed not to fight.

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In the short story, “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien focuses on this to show that everyone fighting in a war has a story. He spends the story describing the man he killed and searching for justification of his actions. He carries around guilt with him because of it, and his fellow soldiers try to help him justify and come to terms with his action by saying things like, “You want to trade places with him? Turn it all upside down= you want that? I mean, be honest,” (126) and “Tim, it’s a war.

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O’Brien creates this backstory for this boy. How he grew up listening to stories of his ancestors protecting their land and that it was a tradition to die fighting for your own land. But O’Brien could see that this boy was weak and tiny and young. He could see that his face was smooth with no facial hair and fingers were thin. This brought so much more guilt onto him.

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1.Guilt is one of the worst things accompanied by death. Guilt plays a huge role throughout the novel. In war, men are constantly dying and these men all become best friends with one another. For example, Norman Bowker felt a tremendous amount of quilt towards the death of Kiowa.

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Contrary to people thinking the United States should not interfere, too many young men were being drafted, and the war was pointless, O’Brien still pointed out that soldiers were still fighting in the war and facing the possibility of not knowing whether they would live to see another day. He described the gruesome memories that he any many other military figures were bringing back home. One scene describes his friend Norman Bowker after coming back home, driving around a lake eleven times thinking about his friend Kiowa drowning in a field of sewage which represents the ability to cut right to the heart of the matter; soldiers coming back from war in emotional hardships. Bowker goes on to write O’Brien only to hang himself a couple years later showing the impact the war had on soldiers and the lack of help they received after the war due to many people not accepting the war. His expresses his opinion by stating, “If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth,

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O’Brien tells the readers about him reflecting back twenty years ago, he wonders if running away from the war were just events that happened in another dimension, he pictures himself writing a letter to his parents: “I’m finishing up a letter to my Parents that tells what I'm about to do and why I'm doing it and how sorry I am that I’d never found the courage to talk to them about it”(O’Brien 80). Even twenty years after his running from the war, O’Brien still feels sorry for not finding the courage to tell his parents about his decision of escaping to Canada to start a new life. O’Brien presented his outlook that even if someone was not directly involved in the war, this event had impacted them indirectly, for instance, how a person’s reaction to the war can create regret for important friends and

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This quote epitomizes the trauma caused by war. O’Brien is trying to cope, mostly through writing these war stories but has yet to put it behind him. He feels guilt, grief, and responsibility, even making up possible scenarios about the life of the man he killed and the type of person he was. This

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688 Words | 3 Pages

War was so much more than just war to O’Brien and he able to share this through his writing. " But this is true: stories can save us. ... in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world." (page

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This is evident when Mr. O’Brien says, “I would go to the war – I would kill and maybe die – because I was embarrassed not to,” (pg. 57.) In the end the author realized what he must do and went back home, so he could fight in the Vietnam

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