Here I sit, lying in a hospital bed. I've survived. That was a very scary experience. I really thought I was going to die. “Leaking to death, I thought.” (203). But, I made it out alive.
Throughout the war, I’ve seen so much of it, death I mean, that its become overwhelming. I’ve had to pick up pieces of my friends, and I’ve had to carry the dead bodies of people I don’t even know. It’s sickening. And I try to become detached from it. But there’s some part of you that just can’t.
I feel extremely gracious that I can be here, even in this hospital bed, lying on my belly because I can’t lie on the other side, because I could have wound up like Curt Lemons or Kiowa, or that old man that I saw on my forth day here. But, I didn’t.
The Reward is the ninth stage in the Hero Journey. This is when the hero recieves his reward for making it out of the Ordeal. In this post, Tim expresses how happy he is to be alive and to have survived the gunshot wound. Although O'Brien never fully expresses his graciousness to be alive in the text, I have interpreted his survival to be his reward after losing Kiowa and experiencing a near death encounter himself. The reason being, that if death is the enemy and death was defeted in the ordeal, survival must be his reward. O'Brien does explain however, that he was scared that he was going to die. When he said, "You jerk, it's shock- I'm dying!" on page 191, you can tell by his tone that he was scared that in that moment, he could die. Therefore, making it out of his bout with death, he was rewarded with survival.
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