The Man I Killed Chapter Analysis

The chapter of “The Man I Killed” starts with an extensive list of physical attributes of a Vietnamese soldier killed by O’Brien in My Khe with an explosive grenade. In this chapter, O’Brien narrates an incidence which had permanently destroyed his life, murdering an innocent man. He had a lot of difficulties describing the man he killed, and that is why he avoided using the first person in his narrative. The reason for doing this was to relieve some of his guilt which had possessed him. The guilt of murdering the young Vietnamese soldier hit his brains, where his emotions and thought divide into two paths. One part of his brain convinced him that he had no otherwise other than killing the man because it was a war where anything can happen. The next part of O’Brien mind told him that he had killed an innocent young soul, who could have become a scholar one

O’Brien applied these elements where he created an innovative form of a story that combines his personal experiences, and his ability as a factious author to animate wreckages of the reminiscence through invention and embellishment. That is, O’Brien applies the “reality” as a starting point to narrate his story as he knew that imagined accounts and incidences could have whole kernels of truth Brooke, 412). At the end of the chapter, O’Brien comments on the lenient aspect of the story despite the fact that the details were fabricated. For example, “They make things present.” In this stuff, they were things that O’Brien never looked upon. O'Brien e contradicted himself with the statements he made. The words he spoke made no sense which is a paradox. Therefore, those words explain the post-modern style used to close the chapter and to entertain the reader(Brooke,