The Things They Carried— The Baby Buffalo

The characters in the book The Things They Carried deal with grief in many different ways—sometimes they joke, sometimes they smoke dope, but they always try to avoid crying, blushing, or showing any type of emotion.  After the death of his best friend Curt Lemon, young Rat Kiley attempts to ease the pain and grief he feels by continuously shooting a baby buffalo.  Unable to process his own emotions, Kiley turns to violence.  Kiley's purpose wan not to kill the baby buffalo, "it was to hurt" it, for he wanted it to feel the same pain he felt after losing Lemon (O'Brien 75).   O'Brien repeats the word "shot" to represent how Kiley pulled the trigger over and over again.  Kiley "went to automatic" to hide his feelings, for even shooting a baby buffalo was better than drying or blushing (75).  After being shot at many times, the baby buffalo is still alive,  which represents that Kiley's act of random violence did little to expel his feelings of pain and loss for they still were, and would forever be, alive inside him.