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Boyatt
AP Literature
22 March 2019
One’s environmental surroundings can affect that person’s psychological and moral traits
greatly due to different types of pressures and demands it has on the individual. Tim O’brien
portrays how the rough conditions of the Vietnam War affects the soldier psychological traits,
making them change completely from who they are in the civilian world. O’brien uses the
character, Rat Kiley, to emphasize how a person;s surrounding takes a toll on the person’s
psychological well being, through vivid imagery, emotional appeal, and brutality of war
decisions.
To begin, Rat Kiley was a medic that has experienced probably the most violence out of
any soldier at war because he has to deal with the blood and terrible injuries everyone
experienced. Being a medic and experiencing the pain and blood second hand can take a toll on a
person’s mental health. Also, being a medic, which is essential for the battlefield you have an
added pressure of saving everyone that has been shot, fallen a victim to a booby trap or a life
threatening disease. And losing a soldier, even if you did everything you could do, is added extra
stress and guilt because the medic couldn't save them. O’brien describes the war as hot, dark,
lonely, and savage-like. He shows how the dark affected Rat Kiley so much that Kiley shot his
own foot because he couldn’t take it. The pressure and uncomfortableness of having to stay
awake throughout the silent and pitch black night, while trying to avoid the major threat of an
attack by the enemies when basically blind creates another type of fera inside someone’s head. It
makes people think about their darkest thoughts and hear things, like Rat Kiley. The difficult
adjustment to do the opposite of what you have to took a toll on Rat Kiley’s psychological well
being making him become mad. O’brien’s dark and descriptive imagery emphasizes that under
Continuing, Tim O’brien describes how the tough conditions of war can create a new
type of personality for a person. Rat Kiley, whom was a good person going into the war
transformed into an emotional mess when exiting the war. The adjustment for him to be silent
throughout the night and fight blindly was too hard that he began to emotionally breakdown and
question himself. In the story Kiley begins to talk to himself and to the voices in his head
because that was the effect of war on him. Throughout his process of becoming mad he would
breakdown and tell his fellow men that he tried his best as a medic, trying to save anyone and the
pressures of war was too much for him. Resulting in him shooting his own foot so he can get
discharged from the war, O’brien uses this emotional and vulnerable side of a tough American
war soldier to show the great difficulty a person goes through emotionally due to their physical
surroundings.
Lastly, O’brien shows how moral traits also transform from the war. As a medic Rat
Kiley had to pick and choose the battles he wanted to fight. Not battles between enemies, but
mental battles with himself, deciding whether or not he should try to save this man or use his
energy towards another that could be more useful to the platoon. In the beginning of the war he
tried saving everyone he could, but as the war progressed he had to begin to decide how and
where he would chose to spend hsi energy. In the story O’brien praises Rat Kiley because he was
the best medic he had ever met. When he was shot for the first time Rat Kiley not only attended
to O’brien’s wound but also physically fought in the battle. But, it is later revealed that even
though Kiley did his best he felt the guilt of death because he couldn’t help everyone. Rat
Kiley’s inner moral battle of his job, once again, emphasizes how a person’s surroundings affects
their action and behavior creating psychological battle within the individual.
All in all, Tim O’brien utilizes Rat Kiley’s mental breakdown as a prime example of how
surroundings affect a person’s psychological health and influences them to evolve into a
different person, act and behave differently due to the pressures of their environment.