man i killed

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O’ Brien in the chapter “The Man I Killed” describes a Viet Cong soldier whom he has killed, using meticulous physical details, including description 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. The central theme of this vignette is time .O’Brien the soldiers is frozen in a moment in time ,recalling the entire history of the dead Vietnamese man while the American troop of soldiers are all moving forward, preparing for another day at war. The one word that best describes the mood of this vignette is shock. "O'Brien" is in shock from killing the man, and the rest of the world is moving around him, all in speech and imagination. Tim O ‘Brien is able to convey the reality of what it means to kill a man in wartime through his highly personalized and detailed account of one man’s death .
O’Brien was and Kiowa was taking turns in the lookout for dangers of the enemy soldiers. O’Brien was watching while Kiowa was sleeping it was then he saw the Viet Cong soldier and he thinks that he was approaching him through the morning fog. As soon as he was the figure moving through the fog he had thrown the grenade in the purpose of scaring him away but the grenade exploded and killed the soldier. He recalls it being terrified, and that his action was automatic, not political and not personal. He believes, too, that if he had not thrown the grenade, the Vietnamese soldier would have passed by without incident. Azar sees only a fallen enemy and compliments O'Brien on a thorough job he cannot understand what O'Brien is feeling. Kiowa is more sympathetic, offering textbook comments, such as switching places with the dead man and that he would have bee...

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...izes the beauty of life rather than the death. The ineffective comments and attempted consolations of O’Brien’s fellow soldiers and the palpable silence demonstrate that nothing can erase the stark facts of life and death. 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.
On the other hand, the history of the dead Vietnamese soldier is fictional. We know that there is no way that "O'Brien" could know all that he thinks, or even most of it. O'Brien is again playing with the notion of truth: The personal history makes the soldier truer to us, more of a real person, but none of what "O'Brien" expresses is necessarily fact. The truth of the fallen soldier is left up to the reader. We can decide whether we feel for this man or want to think of him only as a fallen enemy

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