It's been a little while since I've seen this movie...
He's not able to die in Vietnam until he can forgive himself for his son's death and the other things that went wrong in his life, correct?
-Howard Gordon unbuttons his pants: "On your knees." share
-Fanboy: "Yes, sir!"
I think it's less about forgiving himself for those things, and more about simply letting go of them.
It seems to me that he cannot ascend to Heaven until he has separated himself entirely from his life on Earth.
it seemed to me that not letting go was keeping him alive and fighting for his life on the operating table at the end. if he kept on not letting go he could've survived? i dont know the movie was confusing to me
shareHe was bound to die anyway. Not letting go of his earthly life was tearing his soul apart. His hallucination with Jezzie, the drug/governmental conspiracy, the recurring back pain, the fever, and the last trip to the hellish hospital were fueled by mistakes/tragedies in his life (shown in flashbacks when his family was shown, and including his current war experience and mutilation suffered at the hands of what we later find out to be one of his comrades). Louis is, in his (possibly) drug-fueled, deathbed trip, the guardian angel who saves him from hell and teaches him how to let go of earthly matters in order for his soul to find peace.
shareDepends on how you want to interpret it. If you believe in afterlife and heaven, thats a possible explanation. He wasnt able to move on without letting go of all the earthly things that he no longer needed. If you don't believe in that, you could say that he was clinging on to life and not giving up until it made sense in his mind and he could relax and accept things.
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