Combat, loyalty, enmity, bloodshed, and duty, all words that fit under the category of war. The novel Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand is about Louis Zamperini a strong willed man raised in Torrance, California. He started as a young troublemaker until he discovered his passion for running in high school. That very passion led him to compete in the Olympics. Later he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, a brave decision that would change his life. War and its affinities have various emotional effects on different individuals, whether facing adversity within the war or when experiencing the psychological aftermath.
In Phil Klay’s Redeployment, the war in Iraq is described as an intense masculine experience. Through the pages, the presence of women is marginal, if there is any woman in the short stories, and the reader enters in a realm of men and, more important, of what it means to be a real man. The assumption of war as a complete masculine experience might seem pretty obvious; however, Phil Klay is able to offer a crude and clear depiction of it. The author tells twelve different short stories of men who have only one thing in common: the experience of the Iraq War. But this is not simply a book about the war, but also about the consequences that this terrible experience has on the soldiers.
Throughout the ages, wars have wreaked havoc and caused great destruction that lead to the loss of millions of lives. However, wars also have an immensely destructive effect on the individual soldier. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front written by Erich Maria Remarque, one is able to see exactly to what extent soldiers suffered during World War 1 as well as the effect that war had on them. In this essay I will explain the effect that war has on young soldiers by referring to the loss of innocence of young soldiers, the disillusionment of the soldiers and the debasement of soldiers to animalistic men.
Do you ever wonder the way you would react after returning home from the war? Would you be the same person you were when you left, would your outlook on life completely be changed, would life as you once remembered it be the same?
“The Things They Carried,” by Tim O’Brien, brings to light the psychological impact of what soldiers go through during times of war. We learn that the effects of traumatic events weigh heavier on the minds of men than all of the provisions and equipment they shouldered. Wartime truly tests the human body and and mind, to the point where some men return home completely destroyed. Some soldiers have been driven to the point of mentally altering reality in order to survive day to day. An indefinite number of men became numb to the deaths of their comrades, and yet secretly desired to die and bring a conclusion to their misery. Over all, this story allows us to observe changes within the mentalities of army officers.
Unless you have been in war or have read The Things They Carried, you can't fully
In war, there is a winning side and a losing side, but both suffer casualties. Afflictions are not always dealt in death and physical pain, but also emotional damage. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, he emphasizes war’s capabilities to change people. When Mary Anne, a sweet, innocent, all-American girl, arrives in Vietnam to be with her soldier boyfriend, change is inevitable, and she will eventually lose her naiveté. O’Brien utilizes personification, jarring imagery, hyperbole, and pathos to convey that war shatters all innocence, no matter how hard one may try to avoid the change.
The Wounded Warrior Project recruits the aid of the American public to honor and assist injured veterans of the United States armed forces. Through financial aid, the non-profit organization provides programs for the physical and mental injuries of soldiers with little or no cost to the warriors. The organization also offers support services for the warrior’s family (www.woundedwarriorproject.org). Through advertisements, the Wounded Warrior Project hopes to gain the public’s aid to finance the organization’s programs. The advertisements use rhetorical devices such as ethos, pathos, and logos will be used to further understand how this organization’s advertisements appeal to their audience on all levels. Ethos is an appeal to
“Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected,” Paul Fussell wrote in “The Great War and Modern Memory,” his classic study of the English literature of the First World War. “But the Great War was more ironic than any before or since.” The ancient verities of honor and glory were still standing in 1914 when England’s soldier-poets marched off to fight in France. Those young men became modern through the experience of trench warfare, if not in the forms they used to describe it. It was Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Lawrence who invented literary modernism while sitting out the war. Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen—who all fought in the trenches and, in the last two cases, died
Millions of people have gone through life-altering experiences in their time in World War I. In Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Bäumer, a 19-year-old German soldier, narrates his personal memoirs of this war. He describes the mental change and suffering he goes through as he is forced to mature from a young boy to a soldier in order to survive, leaving him permanently scarred from the throes of war. By employing juxtaposition to contrast Paul’s mindset, before and after the war, Remarque demonstrates how the mental health of the World War I soldiers is damaged because of the abrupt loss of their youth, leaving them in a state of survival and mental instability.
Within Liam O’Flaherty’s short story, “The Sniper”, there are two literary devices that greatly impact the meaning of the story. These two literary devices are irony and mood, and together they show the reader how difficult war can be and how it can pull friends and families apart. While reading the text, the reader can feel how tired, lethargic, yet exciting war can be. On page 1, paragraph 3, the sniper was “eating a sandwich hungrily” because he “had eaten nothing since morning”. In this paragraph, readers can feel how the thrill of war can overcome a person, taking over their actions, emotions, and feelings. Irony also plays a big part in “The Sniper”, helping support the meaning of the story through the theme. At the end of the story in paragraphs 25-27, the sniper decides to look at the body of the man he had just killed, and to his surprise, he finds that the man he had just shot dead was his brother.
Hidden somewhere within the blurred lines of fiction and reality, lies a great war story trapped in the mind of a veteran. On a day to day basis, most are not willing to murder someone, but in the Vietnam War, America’s youth population was forced to after being pulled in by the draft. Author Tim O’Brien expertly blends the lines between fiction, reality, and their effects on psychological viewpoints in the series of short stories embedded within his novel, The Things They Carried. He forces the reader to rethink the purpose of storytelling and breaks down not only what it means to be human, but how mortality and experience influence the way we see our world. In general, he attempts to question why we choose to tell the stories in the way we
Coming home from war may regularly be exhibited as an emotional and heartwarming event, but there is an inherently tragic distance between a warrior and their family. This
Throughout life we experience hardships, and we use these past experiences to help us make future decisions that overall grow as human beings. In Tim O ‘ Brien’s novel “The Things They Carried,” the characters not only carry physical baggage but emotional ones as well. They are forced to feel the effects of war such as guilt, burdens, and other factors that come with being a soldier.
The story “Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemmingway depicts the wounding and post-traumatic experience of the First World War of the main character Harold Krebs and his family. Like most soldiers’ experience of the war, upon return to their lives back home, their lives virtually had no more meaning to them. Krebs presents a painful realization in this manner in which he interacts with his mother. She tries to think of her son as a hero and make him feel like one by encouraging him to re-tell his tales from the war. Krebs knows that the impressions his mother is making are not authentic and she, just like the rest of his fellow town folk are tired of hearing and reading the same stories from the war (De Baerdemaeker 24). Hemingway uses the story to painfully highlight the internal conflict that leaves an individual veteran like Krebs questioning his peculiar heroic status after fighting in the war.