Who is the villain?

Well, to answer my own rhetorical question, in this novel of confession, loss, and a search for redemption, the villain is war and no one else. The antagonist of the story is Tim O'Brien. His memories are the main character in a sense, with him bouncing from one to the next. O'Brien is the antagonist because, up until he revisits Kiowa's place of death, he can not find peace. And the peace he finds there is short lived, due to the fact that he then remembers losing his boyhood sweetheart. the only true peace he discovers is in finishing this novel.

He feels such lose from the war and his life, and he misses his loved ones so dearly. "Right now I'm not dead. But when I am... it's like being a book that no one has read in a long, long time" (O'Brien 232). The people we love and care for are never dead as long as we remember them in a happy way. If we remember them in a sorrowful way and forget to live while we are remembering them, then they are like Linda was whenever Timmy was asking her how death was. She was bored and dying to be alive again. When we cherish our dears ones, and never forget them, then they are never truly dead.