O Brien Character Analysis Essay

O’Brien is an extremely complex character. We are presented him as three different stages, the little boy, the soldier, and the writer. They all posses different viewpoints on certain subjects. Writer O’Brien stresses upon bringing out these differences. A good example of each character having a different viewpoint is their take on death. Little O’Brien came to accept death even at the age he was. Soldier O’Brien digs into that past knowledge and uses it to help him through the war with death occurring often. Writer O’Brien combines his other two ways of mind in the way that he uses his childhood and soldier memory of death to understand it. His view of death come from the fact that he has difficulty connecting his young self, and his soldier self. These discrepancies between his three stages were born from pain and guilt. This encourages O’Brien to improve himself, and they …show more content…
He puts his readers on the spot, and he commonly asks them what would they have done in retrospect to something he had done. O’Brien, then, irreversibly brings his readers into the novel, and thus creates a stronger and more effective relationship between them and him. Some of the audience may question how true O’Brien is being, and if all of his content is genuine. O’Brien admits to his readers that they most likely have a fairer viewpoint of himself than he does. He claimed at one point that he saw himself as a coward. That may not be true because his take on that is more heavily biased than, perhaps, the take on his proposed cowardly character from a reader’s side of things. Such is the reader could claim the fact that O’Brien is a soldier cancels out his claim that he is a coward. O’Brien connects much more with his readers than most writers do, and he explains much of his personal life and his feelings. All of this provides a strong realization of many of O’Brien's decisions as seen by the