Literary Analysis: “the Lives of the Dead”

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Works Cited

O’Brien, Tim. The Lives of the Dead. The Norton Introduction to Literature, Shorter Twelfth

Edition. Eds. Kelly J. Mays. New York: W.W. Norton. 73-83. Print.

Kayla-Mae Conley

Professor Alice Henton

English 102-07

9 September 2017

Questions

- The narrator speaks in first person; it is narrated in both the past and present tense. By incorporating both past and present tense, it helps the reader better visualize the setting of the story. The vocabulary the narrator uses is simple vocabulary, making the story easy to understand. The detailed style helps the reader understand the mood and images of the text. O’Brien functions in the story as the protagonist, he tells stories and writes to make sense of his life. He completely participates in the action considering this is a narrative written by him, about him. The narrator changes in the story from a nine-year-old boy, to a twenty-three-year-old soldier in the Vietnam war, to his present self—a forty-three-year old writer. He perceives that the legacy of a soul can continue to live on after death through a vivid imagination consisting of dreams and storytelling. The other characters, such as the soldiers, participate in this phenomenon. They tell stories about the dead without feeling the grief, perhaps because they are soldiers in a war and death is a sort of a normality to them. I think O’Brien thinks deeper than the soldiers, in the midst of the war he was still dreaming of Linda being alive—even after over a decade of her passing; whereas the soldiers were at war and accustomed to dead bodies, they were sort of mocking the dead and not thinking as deeply as O’Brien was while observing them.

- “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.” (O’Brien 75-76). After interpreting this line, I can conclude that O’Brien has convinced himself that he can keep a soul alive through his elaborate dreams and imagination. He is stating with these components, one can create its own version of a spirit to keep it alive. This is significant to me because it thoroughly explains my argument: “He argues that by having a vivid imagination consisting of dreaming and storytelling, one can keep the legacy of the deceased alive; thus, saving us.”