O’Brien tells this story from the perspective of the protagonist rather than the narrator, there is no narrative commentary on the protagonist’s action, and we can only infer what O’Brien is feeling. He conveys an implicit silence surrounding death in Vietnam that first becomes evident with Ted Lavender’s death. Similarly, all O’Brien can remember of the day of Curt Lemon’s death is the sunlight. In “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien employs the same distancing tactics but pushes them to an extreme, offering no insight into the way he feels. In the action is the implicit contention that by focusing on other aspects of the death, like the sunlight or, in the case of the man O’Brien killed, his physical features and the flowers growing on the road,
