Death As Beauty

As we are now more than half way through the book I feel as if I'm reading multiple books in the sense that each chapter is like its own unique story versus a book thats all about one thing gradually bulding a story. One thing that obviously stands out is O' Brien's use of repetition in a twisted, emotional way. In the moment of death he often describes the details in an extremely gory way and then adds a presence of beauty to it. For example, in How to Tell a True War Story when Curt Lemon dies he describes his death as "almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms.". Another example that can be related to this is in the chapter The Man I Killed. He begins to talk about the man and imagines what his life might have been like before the war. At one point he talks about a butterfly and how it was "making its way along the young man's forehead, which was spotted with small dark freckles.". The nature of a butterfly is beautiful but before it reaches its beauty it must first go through the stages of being a caterpillar capable of giving a nasty sting so much as death. He then continues to ponder what the mans life could have been like if he didn't kill him.  Rather than hating his enemy and disrespecting the body as Azar said "Oh, man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker, You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like shredded fuckin' Wheat.'' he gracefully talks about what his life might of been.