The Man I Killed Rhetorical Analysis

In The Five People You Meet in Heaven, the novelist Mitch Albom says, “In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it.” His quote has a connection to the novel The Things They Carried. Titled “The Man I Killed”. One of the characters defames an innocent Vietcong soldier by killing him with a grenade. Even though it is a war, murder fills Tim with feelings of guilt and shock. To ensure readers Fathom these emotions, the author uses various methods such as repetition, continuation in the beginning of a paragraph, and the first-person point of view from some characters and some parts of his life that make up the young soldier’s life.
Tim stands in front of the man he killed in My
He introduces us to the 3 main characters, Tim, Azar, and Kiowa, which all have the different points of view. The Vietcong soldier was, at first, an inert enemy with a gun. However, after Tim killed the soldier he felt guilt for killing him and began to doubt his own humanity. For Azar, it happens to be that he there to kill anyone that may seems harmful to him and to his friend soldiers. In addition, he congratulates Tim for killing a member of the Vietcong soldiers. “Oh man. You fucking trashed the fucker, you scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like shredded fuckin wheat” (125). Azar did not show any mercy to anyone and actually enjoyed what he did by not having any guilt for killing anyone like Tim. On the other hand, Kiowa seems to understand what Tim is experiencing and tries to help Tim to get over for killing the young man. He explained to Tim that he would have done the same thing if Tim did not kill the man. “All right, let me ask you a question, you want to trade places with him? Turn it all upside down you want that? I mean, be honest” (126). It is demonstrated that Kiowa has deference and a comprehension of Tim yet he knows how to manage the current
He exlpains that young man does not want to be in the war and he sees the reflection of himself in the young man’s life that he makes up. Like when he was back in Minnesota, he did not want to be in war so he attempted to escape to Canada yet when he looks back, he sees all the memories he has with the country he is about to leave and knows he will never be able to. “Which separates Minnesota from Canada, and which for me separated one life from another” (47). He does not believe in war and he has no intention of killing anyone. “In June of 1968, a month after graduating from Macalester College, I was drafted to fight a war I hated” (42). He also gives the Vietcong soldier about how he does not want to be in the war and he just join the war to make his family proud. “In the presence of his father and uncles, he pretended to look forward to doing his patriotic duty” (127). The fictional life he gives Vietcong soldier is that he always afraid to go to war and he also ashamed to not to attends the war. Just like The young soldier, Tim was at first do not want to go to the war but he does not want to live the rest of his life with the embarrassment for not going to the war. “It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was”