A Summary and Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Man I Killed’

‘The Man I Killed’ is a story from The Things They Carried, a 1990 collection of linked short stories by the American writer Tim O’Brien. The collection focuses on a platoon of American soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War.

As the title of this short story suggests, ‘The Man I Killed’ is about a man whom O’Brien’s narrator killed in the village of My Khe during the war. He invents a history for the man, and imagines him to have been a gentle person.

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