// War Literature

First off, I noticed that in the beginning of “The Man I Killed,” the description of the dead man is written in such a way where one feels they need to catch their breath after reading it.. The details are all separated by commas instead of being put into separate sentences. I believe that the reason for this rushed, rambling effect of Brien’s might be to show the hurriedness of the actually killing that took place. It’s sort of like the “Fog of War” metaphor we’ve seen, where decisions are made quickly without time to think.Now that Tim has killed the man, he is taking in all the damage he did it once as is the reader.

What I thought to be a smart move on O’Brien’s part, is to constantly bring up certain descriptions that he put in the beginning of the story, throughout the rest of it. Usually he brings up these descriptions again when he imagines what the dead man’s life was life before he came to the war. It almost feels like he’s trying to give this dead body more life than what he’s known. I think that would just make the fact that he shot him worse, thinking of the life this man had once known and the life he will never know. I would think that giving this anonymous man a story would create an emotion in you that theoretically you aren’t supposed to have in war.

I’m not sure who else thought this, but throughout the story I felt that Kiowa was just annoying.  He just kept coming up to Tim telling him not to worry about killing the man, and then 5 minutes later coming back to tell him to take his time. The whole time I kept thinking, does this man have a guilty conscious about a kill of his own that he feels he has to keep pestering Tim about his? In the end of the story he keeps telling Tim to talk about what happened. I saw the connection between this and the other story we’ve previously read, “How To Tell A True War Story.” In the latter, O’Brien states how it is impossible to tell the truth between what emerges from a war story and what is made up. Kiowa keeps asking Tim to talk in the end about what happened, but we can assume he never does, since throughout the rest of the story he didn’t. However, if he did talk, would Kiowa believe what he says? Would he fully understand what Tim was saying, or would he mistake it for something else, just like the woman in “How To Tell A  True War Story” did when she mistook a love story for a war one?