The narrator, who tells the story in The Man I Killed and Ambush, is Tim O’Brien, but he doesn’t speak in first person. Instead, he focuses on the young man that Tim killed in the midst of the war, and describes the pain, guilt, and agony accompanied with the killing. The reader could easily feel what the author was trying to project through his words; his guilt was so strong that it seemed to be the story’s cornerstone.
O’Brien expresses his
pain in an extremely interesting way; he starts imagining a life that the boy
could’ve had, if not for Vietnam. The details about his life are impossible to
be known by a foreign soldier. He just simply thinks about what this boy
could’ve been if alive, and places blame and guilt upon himself. Knowing that
although he could blame it all on Vietnam, he was the one who actually held the
grenade; he was the one who killed him.
I thought it fascinating
when Tim O’Brien made up a story about the man he killed; I would never have
done that, because thinking repeatedly about the what ifs of a person I
stripped their life of is extremely excruciating; sometimes the burden is
something that we all want to forget. Yet Tim O’Brien mentions later in the
book explains that not knowing anything about the people who you have killed
creates an empty feeling, with faceless responsibility, and faceless grief.
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