The Feelings of a Soldier

     Many authors are able to make the reader feel specific emotions throughout their books, but I feel that O'Brien has done something special with his writing.  As I have been reading, I noticed that I started to have physical feelings, specifically due to his use of cataloging and repetition.  In the first chapter, O'Brien included many lists, some longer than others, that seemed to go on and on.  A key part of these lists was that he did not use the conventional noun then comma and then noun again, but rather he used the word "and" in between the items listed.  Both of these literary devices created paragraphs that delivered a feeling of heaviness.  As I read, I felt weighed down, and it gave me a feeling of burden almost.  O'Brien successfully uses the lists to convey his message that the men carried so much more than just their physical objects, and the things they carried inside weighed a lot more than the other items that now seem superficial.
     In "The Man I Killed," O'Brien uses repetition many times to convey his message just as he had done in the first one.  The narrator, O'Brien, recalls the gruesome scene of the man he had killed in the beginning of the chapter.  The descriptions that the reader sees in the beginning are scattered throughout the rest of the chapter, word for word, and then expanded upon individually.  Obviously, this was done on purpose, and I believe O'Brien wanted the reader to feel that same feeling of running something through your mind over and over again.  O'Brien cannot forget the horrific scene that stayed with him forever, and just as the images reappear in his mind, they too reappear in the chapter.  I was able to grasp the same feelings as the narrator in that I felt like I couldn't get these images to stop coming up in my head.  Through this, O'Brien shows the reader that memories haunt soldiers long after the war, and just as the reader had no control of when a gruesome description would repeat, the soldiers also cannot control the nightmare that is their memory.

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