The Man I Killed

"His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman's, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was lightly freckled, his fingernails were clean, the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him" (O'Brien 118).

This passage along with this entire chapter was very disturbingly moving to me. Although this novel is classified as fiction and we know that most of the stories are untrue, I still find myself questioning almost all of the anecdotes, debating whether or not they actually happened. What was so powerful in this chapter was O'Brien's technique of repetition. On almost every page from 118 to 124 he repeated one of the deceased man's wounds. I think this technique was extremely potent because it forced us to visualize the image of the dead man. The man O’Brien killed.  We knew from the first paragraph what the victim looked like. By reinforcing the vivid image in the readers mind the readers were subject to sympathize with O’Brien. The fact that he recreated the situation and kept repeating the magnitude of the wounds, it made it seem like we were there too.

The way O’Brien reacted to the situation was also very emotive because he made it seem so real and tangible. Staring at the corpse, restating the various wounds and injuries that ceased the “innocent” man’s life, burying himself with grief and regret. As a reader I sympathized with O’Brien. I wanted the dead man to still be alive and I wanted O’Brien to be stable instead of sad. However, even though I wanted the dead man to be alive and O’Brien to be happy, I also kind of wanted the story to be true, because it was so powerful and so heavy that it seems like it almost would have been too good and too tragic for it to not be true. This brings me back to the point that “most of the events in this novel are not true.” If this anecdote didn’t actually happen would the readers still feel in distress? Am I the only reader that questions the validity of these anecdotes despite the message at the beginning of the (fictional) novel? And lastly…does it matter?