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Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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The fantasy does not always make the pain go away. In the Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien in the vignette, The Man I Killed, O'Brien describes a Viet Cong soldier whom he has killed, using meticulous physical detail, including descriptions of his wounds. Then O'Brien imagines the life story of this man and imagines that he was a scholar who felt an obligation to defend his village. In the story, The Man I Killed, Tim O'Brien uses diction, repetition, and imagery to to convey his feelings of guilt and desolation, about the man he killed and link it to his overall purpose of writing the book, to inform readers of war is destructive, the soldiers lives have the chance to carry on forever in story form. Tim O’Brien uses imagery to describe …show more content…

As he stares at the body he sees “His jaw was in his throat...”and his “eye was a star-shaped hole…” which gives the reader a gruesome image bringing them to see what he sees. Tim’s sensitivity is revealed when he shows how captivated he is as he stares at the dead Viet Cong body. Tim allows the readers to see that he has remorse about how he took action to stop the Viet Cong soldier. In order to mask the remorse and guilt Tim O’Brien feels describes the features the man already had possess. The Viet Cong soldier appeared to be a “slim, young, dainty man,” which distracts the reader from the destruction the bomb has caused . His focus on these physical characteristics, rather than on his own feelings, betrayed …show more content…

The life he imagines for this man reflects his own of a life without the war and enemy present. The soldier probably ”hoped...Americans would go away” so he wouldn't have to fight in the war he never wanted to be in the first place. While both men opposed the war they both went for the same reasons, the opinions of their family and friends. The soldiers did not want their family, friends, or country to think less of them for not going to serve in the war. In order to relieve the guilt he feels he negotiates his feelings by building a fantasy, by imagining a story of an entire life for his victim. Tim O’Brien repeats the man’s probable want to “someday to be a teacher of mathematics”. Tim O'Brien use of repetition further humanizes the man and creates this imagined life he could have lived which furthers his guilt. The author does this to show O’Brien’s need to keep the soldier relevant even after his death, and in a sense his life still continues. Furthermore, he uses the Viet Cong soldiers life to reflect his own. Just like himself the man was “afraid of disgracing himself, and therefore his family and village” for not being a soldier. The author uses the comparison between the two to show how Tim sees a reflection of his life in the Viet Cong soldier. Tim begins to not only believe that he killed his opponent, but he

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