Sensitive Character In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

In the novel, The Things They Carried, the narrator is revealed to be obedient yet a sensitive character. We see Tim O’Brien as an obedient person in the chapter Ambush. He explains how it was just instinct for him to throw the grenade at the man. “I had already pulled the pin on a grenade. I had come up to a crouch. It was entirely automatic.” (page 126). This quote shows that when he saw the man, with a weapon, walking on the trail, he only did what he was trained to do which was to the man. However, in the chapter The Man I Killed we see the sensitive side of O’Brien. He did not know the man but he described how the man’s life was before the moment of his death with great detail. “After years at the university, the man I killed returned
with his new wife to the village of My Khe, where he enlisted as a common rifleman with the 48th Vietcong Batalion.” (page 124). If a person was not sensitive , they would not imagine, in detail, the person’s past life who they just killed. We also see the sensitive side of O’Brien when after he killed the man he just sat and stared and examines every detail of the bloody scene. “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole…” (page 118). The killing affected O’Brien majorly and he could not do anything else besides to sit and analyze what he had just did, which only a person with sensitive feelings would do this. Even though O’Brien was brave and obeyed his training, the killing still brought out the sensitive part about his character.