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How Does O Brien Present Curt Lemon's Death In The Things They Carried

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"The mind fills in for what the eyes don’t see, and surprise can make us perceive events differently. As these events replay over and over again in our heads, we discover fictional nuances that, while they may not be real, may represent our emotions towards the said events. This exact process can be found in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, in the description of the deaths of Curt Lemon and the baby water buffalo. Beautiful: the way that Tim O’Brien describes Curt Lemon’s death. It is clear that he was shocked by the sudden, instantaneous death of the young man. “The sunlight came around him and lifted him up” (67) shows that Curt Lemon’s death was almost unreal to O’Brien, and that he finds it surreal. However, the death of the baby water buffalo is a completely different description. Killed by Rat Kiley, Curt Lemon’s best friend, the baby water buffalo suffered a slow, gruesome death that Tim O’Brien forces the audience to suffer through. …show more content…

The death of the baby water buffalo was very real, very violent. It’s likely that O’Brien wrote it this way to convey his emotions about it. The buffalo didn’t mean anything to him, so he saw its death for exactly what it was, exactly how it happened. However, Curt Lemon was someone who was alongside O’Brien in his platoon and suddenly dead, so it’s clear that O’Brien’s emotions affected the way that he viewed Lemon’s

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