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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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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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