Death is inevitable, and can come in many different ways. Everyone in the world is affected by it, and everyone in the world will experience it, and everyone in the world copes with it differently. Don DeLillo's short story "Videotape" and the novel The Things They Carried for the most part tell two completely different stories revolving around the same topic, death. The stories are similar to each other in that both deaths occur in a rather similar fashion, and the way in which characters feel towards the death in each story is parallel to how the author makes the reader feel about the death. However, these stories provide two very different outlooks on death, one being that the death really wasn't that big of a deal, while the other shows how strongly a death can affect someone. By reading these two stories one can really get a sense of just how wide the range of people coming to terms with death is.

On the surface "Videotape" and The Things They Carried are completely different pieces of literature. One is a novel, while the other is short story. They are about two completely different subjects: a car ride being filmed, and a war. However they do have one thing in common. They show how abruptly life can be ended by providing details of an almost identical death. "Videotape," a short story about a girl filming a car ride on the interstate, details a random guy being shot in the head while driving down the interstate. "Videotape" also goes to describe how viewers of the video react to the film.  The shooting is completely unexpected, and the direction from which the shot is taken is unknown to both the reader as well as the viewer of the video itself and the little girl who just so happened to be recording a ride in the car. Due to the girl filming the death, the event is then seen by thousands if not millions of people. The Things They Carried is a novel that describes the events of a group of young soldiers in Vietnam during the war. One significant event of the novel would be the death of Ted Lavender. Lavender's death occurs while he and his unit were on a mission in the village of Than Khe. They are digging trenches and Lavender slips away to use the bathroom without anyone noticing. While he is walking back from using the bathroom, he is shot in the head from somewhere in the village Than Khe of Vietnam. The shot could have come from anywhere, while the other men in his unit are watching. Neither Lavender nor the other guys in his unit were expecting to be shot at during this particular time.

Don DeLillo does not put a whole lot of emphasis on describing the death of the man in the car, and it is only talked about in a small portion of the story, and when he does describe the death, he does it in an abrupt way. He provides a lot of detail to everything going on in the video and during the video, then simply states: "[h]e is shot, headshot, and the camera reacts." DeLillo then goes on to provide more detail on the little girl and her reaction. The death does not come off as very important to the people DeLillo talks about in his story view the death when watching the film of the death. Ted Lavender's death is mentioned multiple times in the beginning of The Things They Carried, giving the reader a sense that the event will be very significant from the start. In fact whenever Lavender is mentioned, his death is almost always mentioned along with him. When Lavender's death is described there is great detail put into the telling, and the reader gets a vivid image of what happened to Lavender: "Lee Strunk made a funny ghost sound, a kind of moaning, yet very happy, and right then, when Strunk made that high happy moaning sound, when he went Ahhooooo, right then Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing. He lay with his mouth open. The teeth were broken. There was a swollen black bruise under his left eye." This gruesome detail causes the reader to gain the same sense of shock, disbelief, and sick feeling that all of the soldiers gain when they see Lavenders dead body. Although both author's detail the events of a very all of a sudden death, without too much focus on the event. The little bit more of detail provided by O'Brien is likely something that causes the reader to have a more emotional reaction towards Lavender's death.

The death that took place in "Videotape" is viewed by many people because it is caught on film. It is played on the news for thousands if not millions to see. There is no doubt that many people view it as something gruesome, however there no grief caused by the death. The film of the death is watched, then the viewer either moves on with his or her life or has to have someone else have the same expirence of watching this random guy get shot on the interstate. Giving a desensitized outlook on death giving the impression that death is no big deal. This may be caused by when the story takes place, the story's setting is more recent in plot than The Things They Carried which may mean that people are beginning to treat death as though it is not as big of a deal as it once was. Nowadays there many deaths caught on film, and there are even some killers that live stream killing people on the internet.

Unlike the death that takes place in "Videotape" Lavender's death is taken more to heart by the soldiers. The death is taken rather poorly by Lieutenant Jimmy Cross as he is the only one that cried over the death of Lavender, and he orders his unit to burn down the village of Than Khe where Lavender was shot. Maybe a way for Cross to get some form of revenge for Lavender. He blames himself for the death because he was the leader of the unit and did not keep a good eye on all of the men in his unit due to his obsession with a girl back home causing him to become oblivious to everything going on around him. The other men in the unit, Kiowa specifically, also take the death as a fairly big deal because they realize that they could be next, they try to joke about it in order to forget, even if only momentarily, about it, and they have trouble sleeping due to the gruesome images of his death. Although they joke in order to try and forget about the death, Kiowa seems to not be able to let go of the death, he constantly retells the death. This probably because he did not have much of an emotional reaction to Lavenders death, and retelling the death may eventually cause him to have an emotional reaction to the death. He sees Cross crying and begins to think that there is something wrong with himself because he didn't cry.

Don DeLillo's "Videotape" and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried are very different, they each provide a different outlook on how something like death can be viewed. Even though the death that each story describes ends up being eerily similar to that of the other story. These differences in views are likely due to the fact that the subject matter o so different as well as the time in which each story takes place, but they do a great job of showing just how vast the views people have of death are.
