Guilt

                In the chapter “The Man I killed/Ambush” the narrator is O’Brian. There is a small difference between the narrations of the two chapters. In “The Man I killed” O’Brian refrains from using the word “I”, as to make the entire chapter about the man he killed instead of himself. In “Ambush” things are very different because the chapter focuses in his point of view and on how he felt and also what happened that led him to kill the man.  Especially in “The Man I killed”, the man that O’Brian killed is described not only by his physic but by his life. Many intimate details as his young life, career, and love life are given my O’Brian even though there is no way for him to certainly know this information.

                O’Brian makes a judgment of the man he killed judging in his appearance and the fact that he is from Vietnam. He generalizes him with other Vietnamese that go into the war because their parents trained them to protect the land. O’Brian feels so responsible for his death that his brain plays the old trick on him in which one over analyzes something and makes it worst for you than how it already was. He is just feeling guilty for what he has done so he makes that guilt even bigger by thinking of how the life that he has ended could have gone. This makes him feel guiltier than what he already is and that is what he wanted to do, to feel guilty because that is what he feels a normal person should do. In a concise way, the details come from his guilty mind.