In Martel's novel, "The Life of Pi," the castaway Pi witnessed the horrific death of another castaway within the confines of a lifeboat adrift at sea. This death was caused by another fellow castaway, but this was not the human type of castaway. This survivor of the shipwreck was a tiger named Richard Parker. Compared to O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," Kiowa, a soldier in Vietnam, sees Lavender, a man in his platoon, suddenly shot and killed by a random sniper. Despite the fact that they both witnessed a murder that occurred without warning, each of them reacted very differently to their encounter with death. While Kiowa the soldier didn't feel much “except surprise” and pleasure at still being alive, Pi became a complete mess inside, to the point that a part of him died with the unfortunate castaway (O'Brien 88) . The reason Kiowa wasn't as shocked as Pi by the deaths he witnessed was because he wasn't as emotionally exhausted as Pi was at the time, and his body could handle the sudden emotion better. Pi, in Yann Martel's story, had just resigned himself so completely to death that he had actually “resolved to die” (Martel 241). For months he was on the brink of starvation as he floated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in a small lifeboat. The boy had come to this sad place of mind due to his recently acquired blindness. His lack of sight was the result of the malnutrition he was subjected to. Pi's lack of nutrients during his stay in the lifeboat had already stripped most of the boy's strength from his body. His blindness, combined with his increasingly weakened state that was so severe that he "could no longer stand", left him complete... middle of paper... he had Pi as a result. Ted Lavender's appearance afterward wasn't that bad compared to the form of the man Pi encountered in the Pacific. Lavender had simply been hit in the head, and the only part of him that was really damaged were his teeth and cheekbone. He had not been torn to pieces by an animal, and the sight of his remains did not strike a sickening horror within Kiowa as the torn body of the stranger in Pi had done. Many things affected how Kiowa and Pi reacted, including body shape. there were dead bodies, how calloused the survivors were, and how stressful the events leading up to their deaths were. All these elements contributed to the emotions of the two young people. those elements indirectly controlled how Pi and Kiowa reacted to the deaths of Lavender and the castaway, deaths that were quick and very unexpected "boom-downs" (O'Brien 88).