Curt Lemon

Curt Lemon was a childish and careless member of the Alpha Company, who was killed while tossing a grenade in a game of catch. Though O’Brien doesn’t particularly like Lemon, Lemon’s death is something O’Brien continually contemplates with sadness and regret. The preventability of his death and the irrational fears of his life—as when a dentist visits the company—point to the immaturity of many young American soldiers in Vietnam.

In addition to Ted Lavender, a few other members of the Alpha Company are killed during their mission overseas, including Curt Lemon, who is killed when using a grenade to play catch with the medic, Rat Kiley. Though O’Brien is not close to Lemon, in “The Dentist,” he tells a story of how Lemon, who faints before a routine checkup with an army-issued dentist, tries to save face by insisting that a perfectly good tooth be pulled.

In the stories of Curt Lemon and Kiowa, O’Brien explains that his imagination allowed him to grapple successfully with his guilt and confusion over the death of his fourth-grade first love, Linda.

Curt Lemon is the most comic character in the novel. The essence of the comic, as well as tragic, is contradictory. But the quality of the latter, which is evaluated as a comic, is of a different kind: comics is the result of contrast, disorder, opposition to the ugly beautiful, low - elevated, inner emptiness - an appearance that claims to be meaningful. In the comic contradiction, there are two opposing initiations, the first of which is considered positive and attracted attention, but in fact turns into a negative property. Comic, like any aesthetic phenomenon, is social. He isn’t in the object of laughter, but in the subject, that is, one who perceives the contradiction as a comic.

Curt Lemon is capable of treating people’s disadvantages with humor; he feels the power to overcome and improve, that is, broadens the limits of his own freedom.