The Man I Killed: (not me... Tim O'Brien... but not him either, actually)

This chapter shows more of Tim O'Brien's vivid imagination. He imagines himself into people's souls and then writes down what he sees and publishes it, and we the readers end up with page after page of highly realistic semi-truth.

"He loved mathematics," page 121, is when I plucked up my proverbial grain of salt. Nobody loves mathematics, O'Brien. You can't fool me.

In all seriousness, though, he ground (grinded? ground.) that image into our brains. I suppose it's called imagery. The dainty wrists, the star-shaped hole, the jaw in the neck-- I didn't have to look back in the book to think of those descriptions, and I read them half a book ago. O'Brien said it so many times that it's completely convincing that he remembers it vividly himself. It's as if he's so startled/scarred by it still today that he doesn't even notice he's repeating himself. Maybe it's more that he wants to be sure we catch that description even if the rest of the chapter zooms in one eye and out the other.