The Man I Killed/Ambush

Thematic Search--Things They Carried

GROUP A:

Spark Notes analysis:

"O’Brien illustrates the ambiguity and complexity of Vietnam by alternating explicit references to beauty and gore. The butterfly and the tiny blue flowers he mentions show the mystery and suddenness of death in the face of pristine natural phenomena. O’Brien’s observations of his victim lying on the side of the road—his jaw in his throat and his upper lip gone—emphasize the unnaturalness of war amid nature. The contrast of images is an incredibly ironic one that suggests the tragedy of death amid so much beauty. However, the presence of the butterfly and the tiny blue flowers also suggests that life goes on even despite such unspeakable tragedy. After O’Brien killed the Vietnamese soldier, the flowers didn’t shrivel up, and the butterfly didn’t fly away. They stayed and found their home around the tragedy. In this way, like the story of Curt Lemon’s death, “The Man I Killed” is a story about the beauty of life rather than the gruesomeness of death."

Find contrasting images of beauty and gore in the chapter.  Do you agree with this analysis?
 Where else in the novel do you find images of the beauty of life contrasted with the gruesomeness of death?




Group B:

Again, from Spark notes:


“The Man I Killed” sets up ideas that are addressed in “Ambush,” just as “The Things They Carried” sets up ideas that are addressed in “Love.” The refrains of “The Man I Killed,” such as “he was a short, slender man of about twenty,” are constant, adding to the continuity of the storytelling. Unlike “The Man I Killed,” which seems to take place in real time, “Ambush” is already a memory story—one with perspective, history, and a sense of life’s continuation. As such, O’Brien uses his narrative to clear up some of the questions that we might have about the somewhat ambiguous version of the story in “The Man I Killed.” But O’Brien’s memory is crystal clear. He remembers how he lobbed the grenade and that it seemed to freeze in the air for a moment, perhaps indicating his momentary regret even before the explosion detonated. He has a clear vision of the man’s actual death that he probably could not have articulated so close to the occurrence. O’Brien’s simile about the man seeming to jerk upward, as though pulled by invisible wires, suggests that the actions of the men in Vietnam were not entirely voluntary. They were propelled by another power outside of them—the power of guilt and responsibility and impulse and regret.


Where else in the novel do you find references to the power of guilt , responsibility and regret?

Group 3 Tim O'Brien discussing "Ambush":

Male audience member (Frank Grzyb): Hello? I've read several of your books, and very curious about how much is real and how much isn't real. That's the first question. I find a lot to be real; you may have a different answer. The second question is I read a story that I find highly improbable, but it could be factual, knowing how weird Vietnam was, and that was, basically, about a guy who called and got his girlfriend to come into country, and she ended up in a Green Beret outfit, and I said, this could never happen, but Vietnam was so strange, it was liable to happen.
Tim O'Brien: Yeah. Well, I'll respond in two ways. One - excuse me, my cold is hitting me now - (coughs) Excuse me. Number one, uh, the literal truth is ultimately, to me, irrelevant. What matters to me is the heart-truth. I'm going to die, you're all going to die, the earth is going to flame out when the sun goes. We all know the facts. The truth - I mean, does it matter what the real Hamlet was like, or the real Ulysses - does it matter? Well, I don't think so. In the fundamental human way, the ways we think about in our dream-lives, and our moral lives, and our spiritual lives, what matters is what happens in our hearts. A good lie, if nobly told, for good reason, seems to me preferable to a very boring and pedestrian truth, which can lie, too. That's one way of answering.
I'll give you a more practical answer. The last piece I read for you, it is very, and it does approximate an event that happened in my life, and it's hard for me to read to you, at the same time it wasn't literally true in all its detail. It wasn't a hand grenade, it was a, was a rifle thing. We had circled the village one night - called it cordoning the village - and this stuff never worked in Vietnam-those vets who are here know what I'm talking about-these things never worked, but it did, once. We circled the village and we drove the enemy out in daylight, and three enemy soldiers came marching-the silhouettes like you're at a carnival shoot - and about eighteen of us or twenty of us were lined up along a paddy dike. We all opened up from, I don't know, eighteen yards or twenty yards away. We, really, we killed one of them; the others we couldn't find, which shows you what bad shots we were on top of everything else. Well, I will never know whether I killed anyone, that man in particular - how do I know? I hope I didn't. But I'll never know.
The thing is, you have to, though, when you return from a war, you have to assume responsibility. I was there, I took part in it, I did pull the trigger, and whether I literally killed a man or not is finally irrelevant to me. What matters is I was part of it all, the machine that did it, and do feel a sense of obligation, and through that story I can share some of my feelings, when I walked over that corpse that day, and looked down at it, wondering, thinking, "dear God, dear God, please don't let it have been my bullet, Dear God, please." Um, that's the second answer.

What does this reveal about the purpose of these two stories-- "The Man I Killed" and "Ambush"-- in the novel?