The Lives of the Dead

In the last chapter, The Lives of the Dead, O'Brien's unique writing techniques are again used. The chapter opens with vague information that we do not yet know the story behind, but is explained and repeated throughout the chapter. "But this too is true: stories can save us. I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive" (O'Brien 255). Linda is introduced later in the chapter. She was his first young love at age nine, "Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones-- that kind of love" (258). The idea of having a love so strong that you want to become a part of it, or consume it is also used in another chapter of the book. O'Brien tells Linda's heart-tugging story. How she began wearing a red hat to school every day and never took it off, even when she was teased about it particularly by a bully named Nick Veenhof. One day during class Nick managed to pull off her cap and revealed Linda's bare head, "A smooth, pale, translucent white. I could see the bones and veins; I could see the exact structure of her skull. There was a large Band-Aid at the back of her head, a row of black stitches, a piece of gauze taped above her left ear" (264). Linda soon died from a brain tumor, and Timmy took her death hard. But he learned ways to keep her alive through his dreams and stories, which explains his first sentence of the chapter about stories being able to save us. And all his stories from Vietnam that he told in the book, whether some are true or fictional, they keep the characters alive (Linda, Kiowa, Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon, the man he killed, etc).