Bringing Back the Dead

      O’Brien (once again the writer O’Brien) states that dead people have the ability to live in stories and dreams.  That makes me think that O’Brien is telling this story, so he can imagine all of his dead friends alive.  In these stories O’Brien is practically reliving these events because he misses his friends.  O’Brien does not know how to deal with the death of these people, so he writes about them to pretend that they aren't dead anymore.  Instead of dealing with death or trying to get over it, O’Brien is just trying to erase death all together.  He believes that putting people in stories makes them less dead, so he continues to put them in stories to make them not seem dead, but alive.  O’Brien started doing this with Linda at a very young age, but he used dreams not writing (I know he eventually switched to writing about Linda).  He still dreams about Linda because that is how he makes her feel alive.  In the last couple sentences of the book O’Brien wrote, “I can see Kiowa, too, and Ted Lavender and Curt Lemon, and sometimes I can even see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights”.  This sentence shows that these people are coming back to him through not only imagination and memory, but writing.  The more O’Brien writes about them the greater his memory is of them and that allows him to not think about death.