Reality vs. Fiction: "The Man I Killed"

In distorting the boundaries of truth, O'Brien does this most significantly when talking about the man he killed. Throughout the book, spanning literally a length of 80 pages, O'Brien slowly pieces together the story behind his allusions to "the man I killed". This is easily the most confusing element of the book, with FOUR different versions of the story being presented, all of them conflicting, and "all of them true", according to O'Brien.

There is the first version, in which the events leading up to the Vietnamese soldier's death are not discussed, and we're brought into the aftermath - O'Brien describing the dead soldier that lay in front of him, saying simply that he killed him, no further explanation.

There is the second version, where O'Brien recounts an ambush and details up until the second before he kills the soldier mentioned in the previous chapter - except, this time, the soldier's body is never recovered after the ambush, and we're left uncertain as to if he died or got away.

There is the third version, where O'Brien is only a bystander, and another member of alpha company throws the grenade that kills the soldier. But O'Brien feels so guilty watching that grenade be thrown that he considers himself the killer none the less.

Finally, there if the fourth version told from the perspective of the Vietnamese soldier, not O'Brien, who narrates the events of the ambush up until his death.

after each version of events, O'Brien immediately discredits himself, saying that what he has told us is not true. He then discredits himself further, saying that claiming the stories were not true is also untrue. O'Brien does this to draw a line between "happening true" and "story true", because he wants to emphasize that truth is a feeling and not an event. His message is that regardless of what actually happened that day, he killed a man because he did nothing to stop it, and the guilt he carries with him is truer and more real than the events that objectively determine whether or not he killed a man.