The Man I Killed

The Man I Killed

The Man I Killed is a depressing chapter that sets a very solemn mood for the story. This chapter tells the story of a time in which Tim O’Brien kills a young boy who he believes is being forced against his will. Tim seems to have perpetual knowledge about this boy and believes that the kid was a great student with a loving family and a bright future without any clear evidence to prove so. The Man I Killed is told by Tim O’Brien but it is a different Tim O’Brien then we have met in the previous chapters. Unlike the Tim O’Brien that we have seen in all the previous chapters who is full of thoughts and emotions and loves to dialogue with other characters, this one doesn’t ever mention a single word about his thoughts and feelings, let alone talk to another character. Kiowa attempts countless times to initiate a conversation with Tim, telling him that he did the right thing and that the kid himself was armed, but Tim just can’t get over the fact that he has killed another human being. In the next chapter, Ambush, Tim tells his account of the story and this time he shares what he was feeling at the moment and why he acted the way he did. One of the core reasons for his distress is that he truly believes that had he not just taken any action, the kid would have just gone his own way and lived a great life. In this chapter O’Brien keeps repeating his description of the boy just laying there on the trail over and over, focusing mainly on the beautiful aspects of the boy such as the star shaped hole in his eye, which was a result of the blast, and his clean black hair which implied that he was relatively new to the war.
In his description of the boy, O’Brien not only points out many of the physical aspects of the boy, but also much of the boy’s life, what he liked, what he disliked, what he dreamed of, who he loved, and so on and so on. As I read this I was baffled by how he could have known all these details about the kid’s life. Having just read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer in which he has interviewed almost every single person who participated on the expedition to the top of Everest, the native guides included, I was used to the author having almost an unlimited pool of knowledge,but the degree of knowledge which O’Brien has on this kid was just too much for it to all be true. I had speculated for a while whether the whole entire story could be fake and he just completely made up this character from the ground up, I finally got my answer in a future chapter called Good Form in which he admits that he did not actually kill the boy but he was present and that his presence alone was enough to cause guilt. This finally answered my question of how exactly did Tim O’Brien know all this about the kid with one simple answer, he didn't. Tim doesn't actually know who the kid loved, what he studied at school, or how his family felt about the war, it is all made up, and by keeping that in mind, the story made much more sense than the first time I read it. But we all know that no great author like Tim O’Brien would just make up such a character, so after a lot of hard thought I finally concluded that the boy is actually a mirror image of how Tim O’Brien pictured himself before the war. One key example is when Tim says that the boy didn't agree with the causes of the war and didn't even want to be fighting but was forced to by the pressures of society, when compared to the views of Tim O’Brien in the chapter On the Rainy River, they are nearly identical. Another example is when he talks about how the kid was very intelligent and had a bright future, which sounds a lot like when Tim talks about how he graduated top of his class in High School and went on to College. I believe he tries to create this kid as a mirror image of himself so that he can relate to the kid and because he knows that at any moment it could be him who was lying on the ground with a star shaped hole where his eye used to be. This is one of the most powerful stories in the book and by far one of my favorites.