The Crowded Void

For writers who are willing to portray their very own ideologies through a story or a passage, language sometimes becomes a limitation for them. There are certain passages or scenes that become unreal when one attempts to deliberately describe them. Words frame feelings into certain categories, therefore when more words are being used to describe thoughts or feelings, the scene gets more detached from what it really is. However, in the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien develops an alternative way to present his feelings and ideologies: instead of directly describing the feelings, he establishes a dramatic scene that allows the audience to experience the terror and wonder of war.

One of the most iconic uses of this technique is in the front part of the chapter “The Man I Killed”, where O’Brien presents and reflects on the moment when he first sees the corpse of a man he killed in an ambush. In this passage, O’Brien delivers a guilty, paralyzed, and haunted feeling to the audience with his use of repetitive composition structure, vivid and shocking imagery, and comparison between two symbolic figures. Through letting the audience experience the unique and life-changing feelings that the soldiers experienced, O’Brien effectively delivers his complex ideas toward life, death, and killing. He manages to plant a seed of thoughts into the audiences mind, and allow the audience’s complex feelings and ideas blossom through the process of reasoning and reflecting.

Looking at the context of this passage, the author did not present the purpose of this story as instructive or informative, the chapter starts off with a descriptive passage about the appearance of the corpse, and the reaction of the people around the author. The selected excerpt adapts that structure and makes it a repetitive element that is sustained throughout the chapter. This structure presents Kiowa’s monologue and the author’s thoughts alternately based on a consistent hidden thread, which is the author’s ideologies toward death and killing. Although Kiowa’s words and O’Brien’s thoughts seem detached, they support each other’s ideas by providing audiences different viewpoints of the scene:

Kiowa and O’Brien had almost no interactions with each other in this scene. The author purposefully keeps the two repetitive elements look unrelated and disharmonious; however, their implications correlate. Kiowa’s arguments seems to become more and more pale and bland as O’Brien continues to be silent. In the beginning, Kiowa points out the most obvious moral he can think of, and tries to use that to persuade O’Brien that he has done something right. However, O’Brien kept silent, his thought focuses on the corpse as well, but in a different way. Unlike Kiowa, O’Brien is not trying to find himself a way out of the problem, he directly faces the corpse and the thoughts generated by that scene. The more Kiowa tries to make O’Brien to respond to him and walk on from this problem, the deeper O’Brien gets into his wonders and imaginations. This process gets repeated several times in this excerpt, the characters’ attitudes gradually shifts through these repetitions. At first, Kiowa seems to be the one who was certain of his ideologies, and O’Brien seems to be paralyzed; but as the silence carries on, O’Brien gets deeper and deeper into his imaginations, his attitudes become stronger and clearer, while Kiowa starts to doubt his ideologies. This repetitive process presents the people with the depressed thought process of the two characters and gradually amplifies their depression to an extent where it becomes haunting.

In this process, Kiowa is getting more and more uncertain of what he believes. The silence from O’Brien makes him revise his arguments. When he tries to come up with more meaningful arguments to persuade O’Brien, he gradually realizes that the value of life and death becomes somewhat blurry in this scenario, what used to be defined arguments suddenly becomes meaningless when he faces O’Brien. He starts to question himself: “Okay, maybe I don’t know” (O’Brien 188). This monologue expresses his helplessness toward the situation. Kiowa is getting aware of the fact that all of the things he told O’Brien are nothing but his own interpretations. He is trying to find a way to omit the cruel reality by giving a careless judgment to it. However, the person he is facing does not want to lie to himself. In Kiowa’s attempts of interacting with O’Brien, he was being forced to face the fact that there are actually no justifiable killings, it is impossible for one to omit the evilness of the action of killing — it ends all the possibilities, all the values of a person. These ideas are all presented through the monologue of Kiowa, although this is not an eloquent way of developing a concept, it fits the tone of the passage very well. Together with some short and direct descriptions of the movements of Kiowa, the author manages to make the readers focus on what’s behind his words. The simplicity here makes the words powerful, it gives the audiences a chance to think actively and make Kiowa’s thoughts their own.

While Kiowa’s paralyzation increases, O’Brien was having a haunted imagination. Unlike Kiowa, he dares to and has to directly face the problem of killing and death. Although O’Brien does not give direct lectures about his opinions toward killing, he presents the suffering thinking process he had when he faces the corpse. O’Brien’s essential method of presenting the ambiguous but haunted thoughts is through an extensive use of imagery and vivid imaginations.

The primary reason why O’Brien’s thoughts about the corpse are effective on creating vivd and complicated feelings is because that instead of making a direct inference toward the guilty feelings, the author presents the feelings to the audience by creating scenes that connects with their humanity. At first, O’Brien’s thoughts focused on showing how horrible the corpse’s appearance was: “His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut and the other was a star-shaped hole” (O’Brien 186). Although the author sounds quite calm and peaceful when he describes the appearance of the corpse, he introduces the most bloody detail of the corpse. Such strong and vivd description creates a very dramatic picture and draws people’s sympathetic feelings toward the dead man, and evokes their fear toward death. By producing a rather inhumane scene, the author challenges the moral bottom lines of the audience to let them be aware of the of the fact that O’Brien’s humanity being tested. Although this expert establishes a very uncomfortable scene, it makes the audience become aware of the most basic morals that people usually take for granted, which is to be able to live and die with dignity.

The author’s critical thinking did not end with the awareness of humanity. Through the repetitive thinking process, O’Brien starts to present the audience with imaginations of the dead man’s background: what kind of person he is, what things he might have done, what he loved, and what he was afraid of. By making the man a round and vivid figure, O’Brien connects the readers with a Vietnamese man instead of only a dead corpse. The man O’Brien killed is no longer detached form the soldiers’ lives after O’Brien gave him a story, the figure of the corpse becomes humane through this process. However, after creating such a meaningful scene for the readers, the author tears the humane feelings apart by directly pointing out the fact that the man has been cruelly killed already. His love, hatred, and all the other characters will no longer exist, all of his values becomes nothing. He used to be a real person with a meaningful background and a hopeful future, but O’Brien puts an end to all of this using a hand grenade. The author’s tone does not change much when he shifts from his imaginations to the corpse’s conditions, however, by keeping this consistent tone, the author makes this scene even more evil and haunted. For instance, the author uses a very smooth and peaceful description when he mentions that the head of the corpse was not quite facing the flowers near the road. He sounds like describing some regular object in a rather casual way. This tone really contrasts with the feelings a corpse delivers, it enhances the cruelty and horror of the death of the Vietnamese soldier through a dramatic comparison between a figure that represents peace and joy, and a figure that represents violence and grief. O’Brien’s experience proves that war is not only about cruelty and hatred, because war is not fought by machines, it is fought by real lives that understand the preciousness of their existence. War does not eliminate feelings, it creates the most colorful and dramatic contemplations of humanity.

Throughout the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien attempts different ways to present the audience war stories that are true to his feelings and based on his unique ideologies. This excerpt from “The Man I killed” is a unique way of delivering these ideas to the audience. The arrangement of this scene is like a Shakespearian play, where simple but powerful figures create complicated feelings through rather absurd actions. O’Brien uses a variety of plain rhetorical strategies to present this painful scene to the audiences. He makes the audience realize that there are so much more to this scene than simple morals. Both Kiowa and O’Brien are facing the meaningless void of life and death in this situation, the author does not want to save them (and the audience’s thoughts) from this void using his story, instead, he presents their helpless and paralyzed emotions to the audience. He does so because he is aware that only when prejudices and presupposed morals are eliminated, people could see who they truly are, and what humanity really is. When a person faces this absurd and meaningless void, his/her reactions are the most truthful reflection of humanity.