Tim O Brien Ambush Analysis

In the Realistic Fiction titled Ambush, the author Tim O’Brien explains that the man he killed, he did not hate him, nor did he see him as an enemy but feared him for reasons he did not know why. O’Brien supports his explanation by saying “The grenade was to make him go away-just evaporate-and I leaned back and felt my mind go empty and then it fell up again. I had already thrown the grenade before telling me to throw it. (O’Brien 811)” The author’s purpose is to amuse the audience with a tale that he, himself, still has internal conflict with. The author writes in a sorry tone to indicate that the author felt troubled by the events he had done. As the author uses a statement that his daughter said as a catalyst for the story. “You keep writing …show more content…
You can infer that he felt guilty for what he did by the way he says “It occurred to me that he was about to die. I wanted to warn him.” (O’Brien 811) As the author viewed the dead man’s body, he felt conflicted even after his partner tried to help him. At the end of the story, the author mentions how it still affects him today. “ . . .I’ll look up and see the young man coming out of the morning fog. . .” (O’Brien 811 ) From this, the audience can infer that the author suffers from PTSD and has yet to fully recover with what he done that day. The Realistic Fiction, Ambush, written by Tim O’Brien was a gloomy tale written as a story to his daughter. The author believed his daughter was too young, at the time, to be told the truth, so he wrote this tale as a way to tell her without actually telling her. He created a sense of loneliness through the gloomy tone of the story and the order of events. As the story continued, the audience learned more of what happened and why it troubled the author. By the end of the story, it became clear that the author was still fighting an internal conflict about what had