“This is why I keep writing war stories: He was a short, slender young man of about twenty. I was afraid of him—afraid of something—and as he passed me on the trail I threw a grenade that exploded at his feet and killed him.”
-The Things They Carried, p 125
Well, this passage certainly produces ethos to the max, eh? In these two chapters (12-13), O’Brien unloads a tremendous emotional burden. There a couple ways by which he confesses to the reader his actions in an almost cathartic manner. In the first chapter, he repeats gruesome details about the corpse nearly to the point of exhaustion. His repetition indicates that he clearly is still affected by the memory to this day.
In between these details, though, O’Brien does something that is remarkably haunting. He vividly describes the young man’s appearance and goes on to meticulously describe an imagined life for this man. Truthfully, O’Brien describes this man more vividly and personally than he does any of his comrades. By giving this corpse a life full of emotions, of love and fear and duty, he humanizes this young man more than the Americans. By the time O’Brien actually describes the man’s death in the second chapter, the reader almost sympathizes more with the man than with Alpha Company. O’Brien unloads his guilt and shame on the ready, and, by doing so, shares it with us all.
to the max.
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