Analysis Of The Man I Killed

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The Man I Killed, a short story about the traumatic experience of the Vietnam War was written by Tim O’Brien and published in 1990. As a scholar who graduated from Macalester College, O’Brien was drafted into the army to fight in Vietnam, which shattered his plan of continuing his studies. He felt obligated to fight in a war he did not want to participate in. After returning from Vietnam, he began writing to cope with his suffering. In the story, O’Brien depicts how the murder he committed had a profound impact on his life physically and psychologically. He emphasizes his torment by the use of imagery and imagination. His fellow soldiers, Azar and Kiowa, try to ease O’Brien’s misery in order to continue the battle. The story explores the theme
It is vital to understand why O’Brien depicts the dead soldier as “not a Communist”. He does so to show that the dead soldier is not an enemy of his. Both O’Brien and the dead soldier do not belong in the war environment, but feel obligated to fight. O’Brien is completely terrified of the war and the Vietnamese soldier was destined to be a mathematician. O’Brien imagines his own death by putting himself in the Vietnamese soldier’s shoes. But with the same fantasy, he also tortures himself, by imagining exactly why the man’s death might be such a horrible tragedy. O’Brien feeds his guilt by imagining that the man he killed was in the prime of his life. By imagining that the man he killed wrote romantic poems in his journal and had fallen in love with a classmate whom he married before he enlisted as a common rifleman, O’Brien can more easily identify with his victim and understand the terrible nature of the killing. O’Brien also details some of the soldier’s aspirations. O 'Brien creates this fantasy to make the dead man more realistic, causing the reader to think of him as a man, not just a body or an enemy. This is how O 'Brien makes the Vietnam War seem more personal than political. O 'Brien is playing with the notion of truth; the personal history makes the soldier truer to us, and more of a real

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