The Things They Carried: Human Reaction

"Even his fatigue, it felt fine, the stiff muscles and the prickly awareness of his own body, a floating feeling. He enjoyed not being dead." -pg. 17

I found this to be particularly enchanting. Kiowa is happier that he is not dead than he is sad that Ted Lavender died. This is such a good example of what humans are truly like, rather than the sometimes romanticized characters you find in other literary works. It shows the first basic instinct which connects humans to our lesser mammalian counterparts- self preservation. This passage goes to the overall theme of the book, which is presenting people in their most vulernable, realistic states. O'Brien uses Kiowa's inner thoughts to prove that he is not writing a war story about the gore and politics upon which most war writers fixate, but on the nitty-gritty inner working of a soldier's life. These are not experiences that every person gets to experience, but through this passage, and in effect the whole book, they can. It will broadem their understanding of the losses that war produces and take them out of the econimcal and moral spectrum to insert them directly into the hearts of those most effected by war.