Death

The last few pages of the chapter The Lives of the Dead was pretty confusing to me and I have yet to understand all of it. O'Brien consistently mentioning death was definitely not a part of the book I enjoyed. Factoring into this even more was the sudden death of my grandfather. The timing of reading this chapter and the events in my life could not have been much worse. Mitchell Sanders sums it up perfectly when he tells O'Brien "death sucks." Death is a scary, terrifying thing for me to think about; when I was a little girl, nothing scared me more. As I have grown up, that truly has never changed. Consequently, I flew through the last chapter of the book, not trying to understand O'Brien's message. When writing this specific blog entry, however, I realized that I needed to more closely examine the pages. As I did this, I began to think about his techniques of making the dead not so, well, dead. Although his techniques did cause me to worry about his sanity, I realized that we are all like O'Brien and his platoon members. We tell stories to make our loved ones seem 'alive' again; we keep pictures to remember them; we pass their stories down to younger generations. It seems to me that we fight so hard to try bringing them back. O'Brien does not differ that greatly from any of us in this respect; he writes his stories down to feel as if his friends and loved ones are alive and living as he is. From his point of view, not only had he learned to "ke[ep] the dead alive with stories," but he learned that "stories can save us [the living]."