Thursday, January 22, 2015
Themes of Death & PTSD
While reading "The Man I Killed", I noticed how O'Brien narrates death, especially when the death is personal to him. From what I've read and researched about PTSD, flashbacks are recurring and the same horrific incident replays again and again. Throughout his writing, it felt like that in the sense of the details that O'Brien repeated. For example, what the victim looked like and his physique was mentioned two or three times throughout the story. Another characteristic that reflected PTSD throughout the reading was the heavy theme of guilt. Even though it was not directly mentioned, by the way O'Brien analyzed this man's home life made it seem like he was feeling very guilty about killing him. "He spent nights alone, writing romantic poems in his journal, took pleasure in grace and beauty of differential equations" (pg. 122). From this quote and the rest of the paragraph on that page, O'Brien gives a backstory and a life to the man he has killed. He doesn't seen this man as just another dead body but someone who had ambitions and goals and relationships and for that, he blames himself for killing him.
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That was something that also creeped me out during the story. After O'Brian killed the man, he gave him a whole back story, even if it was not true. It brought the human to life for O'Brian and made him seem normal, which made him feel guilty. O'Brian did not actually know the man he killed, and it makes me wonder if O'Brian ever stopped to think "maybe this man was actually a very awful person in real life." I think if he had made himself believe that, then he would have had a much better time coping with it.
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