Summary Of The Man I Killed 'By Tim O' Brien

In the story “The Man I Killed” the author Tim O' Brien is the character in the story but the story does not use first person. This is because the story is not revolved around him but revolved on the man he has just killed in the Vietnam war. The character in this story focuses on the dead man's physicality and the story he has fabricated for him. The character in this story seems to be in shock because he does not speak or stop looking at the dead soldier, “Kiowa shook his head. There was some silence before he said, “Stop staring...Talk to me” (p.797-798) In the story “The Lives of the Dead”, the narrator is Tim O' Brien who tells the story of his first love who happens to be his first death. This story is in first person and he describes how he keeps those he
He gives the young man a story which in turn gives him symbolically life. His life becomes to have meaning and he is no longer thought as a dead man but a person who had dreams, a wife, and longing to be far away from war, “He had no stomach for violence. He loved mathematics...And as he waited, in his final year at the university, he fell in love with a classmate, a girl of seventeen...” (p.796-797) The use of Linda in the war story, “The Lives of the Dead” is to show his readers how he coped with his fisrt death who happened to be his first love. Linda, a girl at the age of 9 died from a brain tumor which devastates Tim O' Brien who than begins to dream about her at night which provides him comfort knowing that in his dreams she still lived. This is how Brien coped with the deaths he experienced in war, “But ths too is true: stories can save us.... They're all dead. But in a story, which is kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit uo and return to the world.” (p.799) The author story tells, metafiction, to keep those that have lost their lives from truly dying. Through the form of story he keeps them living and although these are stories of fiction, to the author it is preserving their