First Person Point of View

"Many years after the war Jimmy Cross came to visit me at my home in Massachusetts, and for a full day we drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and talked about everything we had seen and done so long ago, all the things we still carried through our lives." Page 26

This passage, and really the whole chapter, was an important shift in the novel. In the first chapter the writer was simply a third party observer who reflected on the feelings and actions of the soldiers. In contrast, chapter two is written from the writer's perspective in the first person. This was an effective strategy. It identified the writer as not just an observer but a soldier himself. He shows this especially in the phrase "...everything we had seen and done..." The 'we' shows that the author had taken part in the action of the story. By revealing this part way in, O'Brien sparks the reader's interest. These stories that he has already begun to tell are seen as personal because of this shift.