Character of Rat Kiley in the "The Things They Carried"

You are introduced to many characters throughout the story who deal with their own personal struggles and internal conflicts. From heavy substance abuse to moral convictions about the war and the meaning of why they’re fighting, every soldier is unique in their own struggle on the inside. However, there is one character who sticks out to the audience and his name is Rat Kiley. Rat seems like a pretty normal person compared to the rest of the characters until he witnesses a life changing event altering his sanity indefinitely.

He witnesses his best friend curt lemon die and this sparks a change in him, a change for the worst. Soldiers that witness gruesome and tragic moments of loss during the war are mentally affected beyond point of repair.

Rat starts off in the book as a normal man who has good morals and helps people. His duty is a medic, so he courageously saves others’ lives to the best of his ability.

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He even goes as far as to carry around M&Ms for “especially bad wounds” (O’Brien). Rats story can be summed up to this quote from a literary analysis, “The Vietnam War is so bad that even a kind-hearted, level-headed platoon medic named Rat Kiley eventually succumbs to the stress of war, after his best friend Curt Lemon is blown up into pieces onto a tree by a rigged 105 mm artillery shell. After mercilessly torturing and killing a baby buffalo with his rifle and seeing many more body bags, Rat Kiley finally mutilates himself to get out of war, ''This whole war,'” (Noor-Tehrani).

Curt lemons death is what began Rats downward spiral out of control. Witnessing your best friend being killed will obviously shake anyone up, however it is different with Rat Kiley because he gives the biggest reaction. This event produces the question, why was Rat the only one who couldn’t deal with Curt’s death or at least keep his sanity after his death. Everyone had dealt with a loss but what makes Rat so special? Why did Rat literally go insane because of it? He was Curt’s best friend, and this may have been why it had the biggest impact. He was also the medic, so possibly he repeatedly wondered why he couldn’t save his best friend. These thoughts going on in his head over and over would certainly make someone go insane. The thought of not being able to do your job and save your best friend would have a lasting, indefinite impact on anyone and this is a key point as to why Rat went so crazy.

After his death, Rat decided to write Curt’s sister opening himself up to her in a letter. This eventually did not go as planned because days and months passed by with no response from the sister. This left distaste in Rats mouth as he just explained to her how his Brother in Arms was killed and how much he meant to him. Rat even ends up bawling in the process of writing this letter because of how heavy the subject is for him (O’Brien 64).

Soon enough Rat snapped, he began doing very odd things. Later in the book he ends up mercilessly killing a water buffalo, he shoots it once and then continues to shoot it over and over again for no apparent, logical reason. The killing of the water buffalo represents something for rat, the animal represents innocence and then is brutally destroyed. This part in the novel symbolizes Rats innocence being destroyed, it is a very important part in the book representing the timeline of Rats internal struggle. In the book O’Brien states that “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing things men have always done.” (O’Brien 65). Nothing about Rats story is moral at all, he is an example of a man’s innocence being tainted.

Rat eventually decides he gets to his full limit and ends up shooting himself in the foot to leave Vietnam. This shows just how much of a toll the Vietnam war can take on a man and the lengths he will go to in order to leave that hell. This is an example of Rat being unable to cope with his best friend’s death and the pressures that war puts on you. It shows that a sane man can be turned insane, it shows that a normal man can be changed indefinitely, and it shows how easy it is to lose your innocence and humanity in a time of war, even for level headed people.

This book in a whole highlights the struggles of Vietnam veterans and why they are so different from other generations. A large portion of these soldiers are shown the worst of the worst throughout the war and it makes such a large impact on them for not just the duration of the war but for the rest of their life. The things they see are unimaginable and incredibly violent which will forever take a toll on their lives, and the things they experience are spiritually draining and damaging, and the things they carry are unbelievably heavy both physically and mentally. Rat Kiley was a man of good will and good morals and would of never been though of as to turn crazy and be affected the way he was from the war but he was. Soldiers lose their innocence and humanity in war because of what they see. They lose their innocence because of what they go through and they lose their humanity because of the things they do during the war. They lose their sanity because of the things they carry with them for the rest of their life.

Analysis of Character Rat Kiley in "The Things They Carried"

Many people’s greatest fear regarding their status in life is being overwhelmed and overpowered by factors that are out of their control. Knowing that there is nothing in one’s power to prevent these fears from becoming a reality is a key aspect that Tim O’Brien embodies in the chapter “Night Life” in The Things They Carried. In this chapter, Tim O’Brien constructs an arduous system of imagery, metaphors, and concise syntax to portray Rat Kiley’s sense of self-destruction while still maintaining the parallel connection between syntax and his authentic emotions during the war. Through his use of compelling imagery, cautious syntax, parallelism, and continuously adjusting his purpose of the chapter, O’Brien enhances the reader’s understanding by portraying a common truth among soldiers; death is always minutes away.

The soldiers purposefully distanced themselves from the reality of their horrific situation by referring to their job as walking the “nightlife.” When a person says 'nightlife,' it establishes an image of a bustling city alive after dark. New York, for example, is known as 'the city that never sleeps,' a term often referring to the parties and carefree events that occur during the night in the city. “How’s the Nam treating you? One guy would ask, and some other guy would say, Hey, one big party, just living the nightlife”(O’Brien 208). By substituting the light-hearted term “nightlife” for something that is actually highly undesirable, the soldiers can maintain the illusion of having a relaxing and enjoyable night off. The image of an active city is kept in their minds to act as a broken mirror, refracting and distorting the dreary, and in Kiley's case destructive, circumstances of what is currently the actual “nightlife” in Vietnam. Not only does O’Brien use appositive imagery as a reference to the hidden purpose of Rat’s demise, but he also favors terse syntax as a reminder of the brevity of life.

O’Brien chooses to use clipped syntax to portray the abruptness of death, providing a view of the aimlessness that the soldiers feel and how it parallels the meaninglessness that many feel about the war itself. When the thought of “the crazy rumors of massed artillery and Russian tanks and whole divisions of fresh troops” (208) haunts the soldiers with the knowledge that they could suddenly die without anyone finding them, “lost inside the gaping emptiness that is Vietnam”(211) and ruins the morale of the group, it sends each person deep into their own visions and thoughts. These concise sentence fragments correspond with the depressed and empty emotions of the group, such as “Constantly scratching himself. Clawing at the bug bites”(210) and “Then he almost laughed... The next morning he shot himself” (212). O’Brien’s frequent use of such succinct, yet impactful sentence fragments purposefully delay the reader in order to inflict a lasting theme of depression. The dull, creepy darkness of Vietnam itself instills a sense of depression and obscurity throughout the chapter.

The personification of Vietnam is a recurring tool that O’Brien wields to ensure that the readers acknowledge and discern the hardships that each soldier must withstand in order to return to their former lives and escape death. For example, knowing where the path ahead ends is vital knowledge to staying aware of your senses and mind. O’Brien obscures the path ahead for the readers by saying “in the hours after midnight you’d swear you were walking through some kind of soft black protoplasm, Vietnam, the blood and the flesh” (O’Brien 210). This eerie diction of “black,” “protoplasm,” and “blood” is a method of personifying the terror of marching through Vietnam with the thought of immediate danger and death fresh in their minds. Comprehending the horror that these soldiers are compelled to endure is crucial to achieve the purpose of this chapter because O’Brien wants the reader to be able to personally relate to what happened when “Rat Kiley finally hit a wall.” O’Brien breaks this concise chapter into three clear shifts: the act of walking the “nightlife” and why the soldiers desensitize their stay in Vietnam, the whispering bugs and terrors inside Vietnam, and the meltdown of Rat Kiley. Focusing on the nightlife of Vietnam and all it stands for is a clear source of irony because the soldiers laugh about their party of “living the nightlife,” while actually walking through the emptiness that is Vietnam is mental and physical torture. Rat’s description of walking the nightlife was intended to give an insight to the mental breakdowns that swamp over unprepared soldiers. Kiley claimed that he is plagued by “Swarms of mutant bugs, billions of them, that had him bracketed.

Whispering his name, he said - his actual name - all night long - it was driving him crazy” ( 209-210). O’Brien’s exertion of these bugs in this chapter is a parallel thought to what is actually occuring inside Rat’s head. O’Brien uses these “big giant killer bugs, mutant bugs, bugs with fucked-up DNA, bugs that were chemically altered by napalm and defoliants and tear gas and DDT” (209) to encourage the image of Rat being cornered inside a gaping pit with no escape ladder and millions of “big giant killer bugs,” to eat him alive. This exhaustive use of imagery coexists with the repetitive use of epistrophe in this quote to draw attention to the superb details of the bugs. In reality, there are none of these “bastards homing in on him,” (209) and these terrors are simply metaphors for the thoughts coursing through Rat’s mind through the efforts of attempting to stay in control. Integrating other characters’ different perspectives of Rat’s demise gives the reader many possible ways to interpret how Rat collapsed into his own mind. Rat couldn’t adjust to the night schedule because the terrors of walking through “The purest black you could imagine” (209) haunted him and spooked him into “staring at guys who were still okay, the alive guys, and he’d start to picture how they’d look dead” (211).

O’Brien focuses on what Rat sees and imagines after he has realized how mortal and destructible everyone actually is in order to convey the image of breaking down. When Rat crumbled in front of Mitchell Sanders, the man in charge of the platoon’s communication, he said, not crying, but up against it “He was scared. And it wasn’t normal scared. He didn’t know what is was”(211). The use of the cropped, precise syntax was deliberately laid out to imply the importance of the fact that Rat has no idea what is physically and mentally happening to him. The concise sentences force the reader to understand the bluntness of this fact. Sanders’s role in Rat’s demise occurs when he doesn’t know what to say to comfort his life-long friend, until Rat says that “He said he’s done his best. He’d tried to be a decent medic” (212). After that, he laughed to himself, coming to a final revolution of his thought that “‘This whole war,’ he said ‘You know what it is? Just one big banquet. Meat, man. You and me. Everybody. Meat for the bugs’” (212). This strike in emotion was the last straw before Rat shot himself in the foot to be carried away from the misery of the meaningless war and his soldiers, his brothers in arms. Tim O’Brien’s purpose of the entirety of the book is one: to issue a story of war and misery, and two: to test the art of storytelling itself.

The chapter “Night Life” contributes to accomplishing the purpose of The Things They Carried as a whole by providing an insight into the very mind of the medic Rat Kiley, who endures his own hardships throughout marching the nightlife of Vietnam, as well as demonstrating the friendship of the platoon. Rat’s journey also validates the purpose of reading a story of war and the effects it leaves on its victims because his imagination of the “things” haunting him are an example of the helplessness that all soldiers have to deal with. O’Brien focused on Rat’s specific story in this chapter to use as an example of what could happen to all soldiers. The figments of his own imagination are what truly haunt him because there is nothing he can do to counteract these effects, no matter how nice or true he is to himself.

Having a personal experience coming from O’Brien’s point of view assists in accomplishing the art of storytelling because he lived through the terrors that still haunt his nightmares. O’Brien’s use of complex imagery, concise syntax, parallelism, and continuously altering his purpose provides the reader a first-hand experience in the war itself by analyzing the collapse of Rat Kiley.