Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors
used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
The Dead Young Vietnamese Soldier
Although O’Brien is unclear about whether or not he actually
threw a grenade and killed a man outside My Khe, his memory of the man’s
corpse is strong and recurring, symbolizing humanity’s guilt over
war’s horrible acts. In “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien distances himself
from the memory by speaking in the third person and constructing
fantasies as to what the man must have been like before he was killed.
O’Brien marvels at the wreckage of his body, thinking repeatedly
of the star-shaped hole that is in the place of his eye and the
peeled-back cheek. The description serves to distance O’Brien from
the reality of his actions because nowhere in its comprehensive detail
are O’Brien’s feelings about the situation mentioned. His guilt is
evident, however, in his imagining of a life for the man he killed that
includes several aspects that are similar to his own life.
Kathleen
Kathleen represents a reader who has the capability of
responding to the author. Like us, O’Brien’s daughter Kathleen is
often the recipient of O’Brien’s war stories, but unlike us, she
can affect O’Brien as much as O’Brien affects her. O’Brien gains
a new perspective on his experiences in Vietnam when he thinks about
how he should relay the story of the man he killed to his impressionable young
daughter.
Kathleen also stands for the gap in communication between
one who tells a story and one who receives a story. When O’Brien
takes her to Vietnam to have her better understand what he went
through during the war, the only things that resonate to the ten-year-old
are the stink of the muck and the strangeness of the land. She has
no sense of the field’s emotional significance to O’Brien, and thus
does not understand his behavior there, as when he goes for a swim.
Linda
Linda represents elements of the past that can be brought
back through imagination and storytelling. Linda, a classmate of O’Brien’s
who died of a brain tumor in the fifth grade, symbolizes O’Brien’s
faith that storytelling is the best way for him to negotiate pain
and confusion, especially the sadness that surrounds death. Linda
was O’Brien’s first love and also his first experience with death’s
senseless arbitrariness. His retreat into his daydreams after her
funeral provided him unexpected relief and rationalization. In his
dreams, he could see Linda still alive, which suggests that through
imagination—which, for O’Brien, later evolves into storytelling—the
dead can continue to live.
Linda’s presence in the story makes O’Brien’s earlier
stories about Vietnam more universal. The experience he had as a
child illuminates the way he deals with death in Vietnam and after;
it also explains why he has turned to stories to deal with life’s
difficulties. Just like Linda, Norman Bowker and Kiowa are immortalized
in O’Brien’s stories. Their commonplace lives become more significant than
their dramatic deaths. Through the image of Linda, O’Brien realizes
that he continues to save his own life through storytelling.
