Summary
“The Man I Killed” begins with a list of physical attributes
and possible characteristics of the man whom O'Brien killed with
a grenade in My Khe. O'Brien describes the wounds that he inflicted.
The man's jaw was in his throat, he says, and his upper lip and
teeth were missing. One eye was shut, and the other looked like
a star-shaped hole. O'Brien imagines that the man he killed was
born in 1946 and that his parents were farmers;
that he was neither a Communist nor a fighter and that he hoped
the Americans would go away.
O'Brien describes the reaction of his platoon-mates—insensitive Azar
compares the young man to oatmeal, Shredded Wheat, and Rice Krispies,
while Kiowa rationalizes O'Brien's actions and urges him to take
his time coming to terms with the death. All the while, O'Brien
reflects on the boy's life, cut short. He looks at the boy's sunken
chest and delicate fingers and wonders if he was a scholar. He imagines
that the other boys at school might have teased this boy because
he may have had a woman's walk and a love for mathematics. A butterfly
lands on the corpse's cheek, which causes O'Brien to notice the
undamaged nose. Despite Kiowa's urging to pull himself together,
to talk about it, and to stop staring at the body, O'Brien cannot
do so. Kiowa confesses that maybe he doesn't understand what O'Brien
is going through, but he rationalizes that the young man was carrying
a weapon and that they are fighting a war. He asks if O'Brien would
rather trade places with him. O'Brien doesn't respond to Kiowa.
O'Brien notices that the young man's head is lying by
tiny blue flowers and that his cheek is peeled back in three ragged
strips. He imagines that the boy began studying at the university
in Saigon in 1964, that he avoided politics
and favored calculus. He notices that the butterfly has disappeared.
Kiowa bends down to search the body, taking the young man's personal
affects, including a picture of a young woman standing in front
of a motorcycle. He rationalizes that if O'Brien had not killed
him, one of the other men surely would have. But O'Brien says nothing,
even after Kiowa insists the company will move out in five minutes'
time. When that time has passed, Kiowa covers the body and says
O'Brien looks like he might be feeling better. He urges him again
to talk, but all O'Brien can think of is the boy's daintiness and
his eye that looks like a star-shaped hole.
Analysis
In “The Man I Killed” O'Brien's guilt has him so fixated
on the life of his victim that his own presence in the story—as
protagonist and narrator—fades to the back. Since he doesn't use
the first person to explain his guilt and confusion, he negotiates
his feelings by operating in fantasy—by imagining an entire life
for his victim, from his boyhood and his family to his feeling about
the war and about the Americans. His guilt almost takes on its own
rhythm in the repetition of ideas, phrases, and observations. Some
of the ideas here, especially the notion of the victim being a “slim,
young, dainty man,” help emphasize O'Brien's fixation on the effects
of his action. At the same time, his focus on these physical characteristics,
rather than on his own feelings, betrays his attempt to keep some
distance in order to dull the pain.
Because O'Brien tells this story from the perspective
of the protagonist rather than the narrator, there is no narrative
commentary on the protagonist's action, and we can only infer what
O'Brien is feeling. He conveys an implicit silence surrounding death
in Vietnam that first becomes evident with Ted Lavender's death.
After Lavender's death, men like Kiowa and Norman Bowker struggle
to find words and perspective on the tragedy. Similarly, all O'Brien
can remember of the day of Curt Lemon's death is the sunlight. In
“The Man I Killed,” O'Brien employs the same distancing tactics
but pushes them to an extreme, offering no insight into the way
he feels. In the action is the implicit contention that by focusing
on other aspects of the death, like the sunlight or, in the case
of the man O'Brien killed, his physical features and the flowers
growing on the road, he finds safety from guilt.
The ineffective comments and attempted consolations of O'Brien's
fellow soldiers and the palpable silence demonstrate that nothing
can erase the stark facts of life and death. Azar's tasteless offers
of congratulations to O'Brien and comparisons of the dead boy to
cereal ignore the painful guilt that O'Brien feels. The kinder Kiowa
is patient with O'Brien's pain, but he knows that he can identify
with O'Brien only to a certain degree. Ultimately, anyhow, Kiowa
seems more interested in trying to convince O'Brien that the killing
is no big deal than in helping him work through his emotions. In
between the remarks from the others, O'Brien sits in the inevitable
silence of Vietnam—a stillness that forces one to confront the realities
of war.
O'Brien both consoles and tortures himself by indulging
in a fantasy that he shares several characteristics with the man
he killed. Ironically, the similarity that he imagines is a consolation
for him, despite the implication that he has killed a replica of
himself. By relating to his victim in this way, O'Brien grapples
with and tries to understand the arbitrariness of his own mortality.
He imagines that like himself, the man is a student who, in the
presence of his family, pretended to look forward to doing his patriotic
duty. By doing so he in effect imagines his own death by putting
himself in the Vietnamese soldier's shoes. But with the same fantasy,
he also tortures himself, by imagining exactly why the man's death
might be such a horrible tragedy. O'Brien feeds his guilt by imagining
that the man he killed was in the prime of his life. By imagining
that the man he killed wrote romantic poems in his journal and had
fallen in love with a classmate whom he married before he enlisted
as a common rifleman, O'Brien can more easily identify with his
victim and understand the terrible nature of the killing.
O'Brien illustrates the ambiguity and complexity of Vietnam
by alternating explicit references to beauty and gore. The butterfly
and the tiny blue flowers he mentions show the mystery and suddenness of
death in the face of pristine natural phenomena. O'Brien's observations
of his victim lying on the side of the road—his jaw in his throat
and his upper lip gone—emphasize the unnaturalness of war amid nature.
The contrast of images is an incredibly ironic one that suggests
the tragedy of death amid so much beauty. However, the presence
of the butterfly and the tiny blue flowers also suggests that life
goes on even despite such unspeakable tragedy. After O'Brien killed
the Vietnamese soldier, the flowers didn't shrivel up, and the butterfly
didn't fly away. They stayed and found their home around the tragedy.
In this way, like the story of Curt Lemon's death, “The Man I Killed”
is a story about the beauty of life rather than the gruesomeness
of death.
