"I'm just saying the truth. Like oatmeal" gross... - TTTC

in "The Man I Killed", O'Brien really likes to build the suspense. he paints an extremely vivid picture of exactly what was going on, what the man looked like, and what he was doing. there was nothing to miss and everything left to anticipate. the imagery used here is absolutely impossible to ignore. he describes this man in full once:

"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, 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 ws open to the spinal cord and the blood there was think and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him."

(p. 118)

wow. I'm not sure it could get much more detailed, but then he goes on! he describes, remorsefully it seems, where the body was positioned and more about his shape, slenderness. he compares him to a woman and a child, both vulnerable images, multiple times. it is quite clear that he feels an immense amount of remorse for this man, but even with Kiowa's prodding ("I'm serious. Nothing anybody could do. Come on, stop staring.")[p. 120], O'Brien can't seem to let this one go. sometimes that happens, I guess. such is war. such is life.