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Tim O Brien Ambush Analysis

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The analysis of the deeper meaning of ” Ambush” In the book titled Ambush, the author Tim o’Brien explains that he has killed people. O’Brien supports his explaining by telling the situations he was in. The author’s purpose is to persuade that he had to do it, that he had no choice. The author writes in a serious tone for the readers. “When she was nine, my daughter asked if i had ever killed anyone.”(o’ Brien 811). The author structures this sentence to read in a serious tone, using strong words. The sentence leaves you wondering if he had ever killed anyone. The next sentence in this story tells you the situation he was in, to question if he killed someone. “She knew about the war ;she knew i’d been a soldier.”(O’brien 811). Being a soldier …show more content…

From this point in the story, you know that the author knows his daughter has an idea of what he has done. He was trying to protect his image to his daughter he didn't want to scare her. “You keep writing these war stories, she said, “so i guess you must’ve killed somebody. It was a difficult moment, but i did what seemed right, which was to say, of course not, and then to take her onto my lap and hold her for a while” (O’brien 811). He cares deeply about his daughter and will one day explain when she is older. At this point in the story i think the thesis is that sometimes the truth isn't the right thing to say in order to protect people from it. The author goes on to tell in detail how he felt emotionally- physically, when he killed his first man.The author, tired, and weak from switching on and off watch every two hours. The author is Probably delusional at this time. “There was no sound at all-none that I can remember. In a way, it seemed, he was part of the morning fog, or my own imagination, but there was also the reality of what was happening in my stomach” (O’brien 812). The author is making it seem peaceful in a way. Everything happened so fast the author had pulled the pin of his grenade before

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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.

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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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It is assumed that no one actually enlists with the sole purpose of killing people. This next short story is entitled “The Man I Killed.” Right off the bat, O’Brien goes into extremely gruesome details of the body of the boy he just killed. He describes the wounds for half of a paragraph. In this story, the reader can feel the guilt in the author as he stands on the trail, thinking about this boy’s life before he brutally murdered him.

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(page 68). This is why Tim O’Brien writes the way he does. He wants the reader to believe his story and get a sense of what war is truly

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In the passages How to Tell a True War Story by Tim O’Brien and Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell, there are many similarities and differences between the two passages, but the differences exceed the similarities. While both sections talk about a shooter, human death, and animal death; they differentiate in the shooters motives, pacing, and narration structure. Just as How to Tell a True War Story has the death of Curt Lemon, Shooting an Elephant also has the death of the coolie. In Tim O’Brien’s story, Curt Lemon is killed by a boobytrapped bomb in which O’Brien leads himself to believe is the sunlight. The passage goes on to describe the events leading up to Lemon’s death and how O’Brien believes that Curt Lemon would have thought the sunlight killed him and not the 105-round, “It was not the sunlight.

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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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In Tim O'Brien's “Enemies” and “Friends”, O'Brien shows the effect the nature of war has on individuals and how war destroys and creates friendships. These two stories describe the relationship between two soldiers, Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen. In “Enemies”, friendship is broken over a fist fight about a stolen jackknife, which leaves Strunk with a broken nose and Jensen paranoid of whether or not Strunk’s revenge is coming. While in “Friends”, you see how the nature of war creates a bond of trust, even between people who first saw each other as enemies.

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Tim O’Brien never lies. While we realise at the end of the book that Kiowa, Mitchell Sanders and Rat Kiley are all fictional characters, O’Brien is actually trying to tell us that there is a lot more truth hidden in these imagined characters than we think. This suggests that the experiences he went through were so traumatic, the only way to describe it was through the projection of fictional characters. O’Brien explores the relationship between war experiences and storytelling by blurring the lines between truth and fiction. While storytelling can change and shape a reader’s opinions and perspective, it might also be the closest in helping O’Brien cope with the complexity of war experiences, where the concepts like moral and immorality are being distorted.

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The American revolution was all about freedom and liberty. Characters throughout the story voice different opinions on their idea of freedom and liberty. During this fight for freedom and liberty, there were three main groups. Patriots(colonist against the king), Loyalists(colonist for the king), and the slaves. They all describe freedom and liberty in different ways.

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Answering the call to serve causes enough moral conflict and killing for the war only adds to it. Tim O’Brien struggles to make sense of his thoughts after killing a Vietnamese man while outside of My Khe. O’Brien writes “The Man I Killed” detailing how the man’s disfigured appearance looks repetitively, and dreaming about what the man’s life must of been like before his death. Afterwards O’Brien reflects saying, “It was entirely automatic. I did not hate the young man; I did not see him as the enemy…”

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He fought a war in Vietnam that he knew nothing about, all he knew was that, “Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons” (38). He realized that he put his life on the line for a war that is surrounded in controversy and questions. Through reading The Things They Carried, it was easy to feel connected to the characters; to feel their sorrow, confusion, and pain. O’Briens ability to make his readers feel as though they are actually there in the war zones with him is a unique ability that not every author possess.

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O’Brien writes, “You can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (76). Regardless of the changes within the narrations, the fact remains, that these soldiers are in the middle of battle and the emotion that follows differ for each person. As Kaplan states in his writing, “the most important thing is to be able to recognize and accept that events have no fixed and final meaning and that the only meaning that events can have is one that emerges momentarily and then shifts and changes each time that the events come alive as they are remembered or portrayed”

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The demonstration of the narrator's imagination unconsciously leads his own thoughts to grow into a chaotic mess that ultimately ends in a death. By murdering, it’s his own way of finding peace. He is portrayed as being a sadist, sick man with an unnatural obsession for

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Throughout the story, three major details of the narrator’s psyche are confirmed. First, we learned of the narrator’s deceitfulness. Every morning he lies to the old man with the least bit of guilt. The next continues to prove the madness as the narrator feels utter joy from the terror of another. Lastly, the narrator fabricates that the old man is simply not home to assure the officers.

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The narrator is quite the character, being cold hearted and killing an innocent man. One reason that the narrator shows his insane side is the fact he is accusing the readers that they say he is “mad” for no apparent reason. The narrator begins the story with saying “but why will you say that I am mad?” (line 2).

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