The Man I Killed, By Tim O’Brien Essay -- Vietnam War

Usually when someone is murdered, people expect the murderer to feel culpable. This though, is not the case in war. When in war, a soldier is taught that the enemy deserves to die, for no other reason than that they are the nation’s enemy. When Tim O’Brien kills a man during the Vietnam War, he is shocked that the man is not the buff, wicked, and terrifying enemy he was expecting. This realization overwhelms him in guilt. O’Brien’s guilt has him so fixated on the life of his victim that his own presence in the story—as protagonist and narrator—fades to the black. Since he doesn’t use the first person to explain his guilt and confusion, he negotiates his feelings by operating in fantasy—by imagining an entire life for his victim, from his boyhood and his family to his feeling about the war and about the Americans. In The Man I Killed, Tim O’Brien explores the truth of The Vietnam War by vividly describing the dead body an d the imagined life of the man he has killed to question the morality of killing in a war that seems to have no point to him. The detailed descriptions of the dead man’s body show the terrible costs of the war in a physical aspect. O’Brien’s guilt almost takes on its own rhythm in the repetition of ideas, phrases, and observations about the man’s body. Some of the ideas here, especially the notion of the victim being a â€Å"slim, young, dainty man,† help emphasize O’Brien’s fixation on the effects of his action—that he killed someone who was innocent and not meant to be fighting in the war. At the same time, his focus on these physical characteristics, rather than on his own feelings, betrays his attempt to keep some distance in order to dull the pain. The long, unending sentences force the reader to read the deta... ... big deal than in helping him work through his emotions. In between the remarks from the others, O’Brien sits in the inevitable silence of Vietnam—a stillness that forces one to confront the realities of war. Behind every war there is supposed to be a moral—some reason for fighting. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. O’Brien relays to the readers the truth of the Vietnam War through the graphic descriptions of the man that he killed. After killing the man O’Brien was supposed to feel relief, even victory, but instead he feels grief of killing a man that was not what he had expected. O’Brien is supposed to be the winner, but ends up feeling like the loser. Ironically, the moral or lesson in The Things They Carried is that there is no morality in war. War is vague and illogical because it forces humans into extreme situations that have no obvious solutions.