Men went through so many tasks during the Vietnam War physically and mentally. The beginning chapters focus on training for war and being prepared for the worst. For example, when there is a sergeant in a room with the marines. The sergeant walks to the chalk board and writes “AMBUSHES ARE MURDER AND MURDER IS FUN” (36-37). The
Increasingly convinced that the war had been going on for no fruitful reason, Owen began to write poetry to express the irony of the situation. He set the tone for an entire generation of men and women affected by the war to think and write about the events that had resulted in a blood bath around the world. Owen’s gripping realism is important today because when we read his poetry, we feel as though we are with him on the battlefield, watching as men suffer in a frantic struggle to stay alive. Throughout this essay, I will explore the techniques used by Owen to illustrate the notion of the horror and futility of war.
Pathos is used many times when James is trying to reach the reader 's emotional side. James Hamblin states “You can look back at your responses, remembering the good things and the feeling nostalgic or remembering the bad and feeling resilient” (Hamblin 3). He is telling the reader, when you look back at old messages, pictures, or notes they are going to have at one point either a memorable impact or an upsetting impact. By James saying this in his article he is using pathos by getting the reader to feel those emotions as if they were looking back at their memories right at that moment.
Rudolfo Anaya clearly points that out in his novel Bless Me, Ultima with the main protagonist Tony. From this, Anaya reveals that childhood is filled with disorientation and awareness with the main protagonist Tony, experiencing death. All of these deaths helped Tony grow more and looking back at the death of Lupito, Narciso, and Florence, they were events that confused him or made him more aware of life. Anaya shows people that childhood is filled with many moments that everyone cannot pinpoint exactly. With Tony, he certainly wants to forget his childhood, but he also keeps it in order to remind himself of what made him Tony.
For the women and men back home, the families, their ideas of what their loved one is going through is constantly changing with the novels and movies romanticizing war and the war heroes. Kurt Vonnegut has said before that he believes civilization was terminated in World War I and that "Much of the blame is the malarkey that artist have created to glorify war, which we all know, is nonsense, and a good deal worse that that –romantic pictures of battle, and of the dead men in uniform and all that" (Vitale par. 4). Vonnegut points out the severity of what happens when war is romanticized. Slaughterhouse Five depicts the fantasy of war compared to the reality of it; the gruesome scenes show the reality of war, all the while, showing how easy it is for men and women to believe war is a glorious battle for honor when in reality, it is a living hell.
In the novel Dracula, author Bram Stoker creates a peculiar situation that pushes the main characters to decipher the supernatural from reality. Originally thought of as a myth, Dracula quickly becomes something more than the supernatural. By slowly building the conflict of Dracula himself, Stoker depicts all stages of the change from believing that Dracula is a fictitious character to being face to face with Dracula himself. As he terrorizes the lives of the characters in the novel, they soon come to the realization that Dracula is more than what they formerly believed, and in actuality he is their harsh reality.
Billy’s Coping Mechanisms Billy Pilgrim, the main character of Slaughterhouse Five, was a survivor of the destruction in Dresden during World War II and a Prisoner of War. As a result of the effects of having been a Prisoner of War, and having been a witness to the full immensity of destruction, it can be inferred that Billy Pilgrim suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder throughout the novel, which caused him to examine the events of war over and over throughout the course of his life. In order to comprehend how these components, witnessing the destruction of Dresden, being a Prisoner of War, and PTSD, impacted Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut incorporates the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse Five to display Billy Pilgrim's coping mechanism
Wilfred Owen and Robert Frost successfully convey the brutal, cruel and inhumane theme of violence in their eye-opening poems, 'Disabled ' and 'Out, Out '. Set during the hard times of war, these poems portray different war-related themes and carry their own distinctive similarities and differences, contrasting with one another. On one hand we have 'Disabled, ' written by Wilfred Owen with his intense experience as a soldier in the First World War. His past experience inspires his piece of poetry heavily. Whereas, on the other hand, we have 'Out, Out 's poet; Robert Frost, a British-settled American who returned from England at the start of World War One.
Poet of Sorrow of Sarajevo, Goran Simic spent his life writing about his experience with war. From years of living under the siege and witnessing certain horrors of war, he wrote a poem; Sorrow of Sarajevo. The poem describes the aftermath of the siege of Sarajevo. It also reflects the horror and the death that he has personally seen and felt. Carol Ann Duffy, a poet, wrote a piece about the experiences of war but not from a direct perspective.
These focuses within the novel are explored through the particular themes of bombardment, trench war fighting, different, disagreeing impressions of war, close emotional bond between men, organization of men on the warfront, and loss of innocence among the
In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the author retells the chilling, and oftentimes gruesome, experiences of the Vietnam war. He utilizes many anecdotes and other rhetorical devices in his stories to paint the image of what war is really like to people who have never experienced it. In the short stories “Spin,” “The Man I Killed,” and “ ,” O’Brien gives reader the perfect understanding of the Vietnam by placing them directly into the war itself. In “Spin,” O’Brien expresses the general theme of war being boring and unpredictable, as well as the soldiers being young and unpredictable.
Erich Maria Remarque was a man who had lived through the terrors of war, serving since he was eighteen. His first-hand experience shines through the text in his famous war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, which tells the life of young Paul Bäumer as he serves during World War 1. The book was, and still is, praised to be universal. The blatant show of brutality, and the characters’ questioning of politics and their own self often reaches into the hearts of the readers, regardless of who or where they are. Brutality and images of war are abundant in this book, giving the story a feeling of reality.
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places” - Hemingway (“Ernest Hemingway Quotes”). This fits with the Snows of Kilimanjaro due to the fact that Harry feels as if he is broken. The war and his lifestyle have broken him down with severe PTSD. In this piece of literature, the reader can see how Hemingway has really provided insight into his own personal struggles and how his lifestyle drug him down as he mirrors Harry to his own life. Both show how the PTSD cycle has affected their lives and sent them on a spiral downward resulting in a feeling of no escape.
E. B. White was very passionate about writing and more specifically the style of it. So when White found William Strunk's book full of writing rules and tips, he knew he could not let his old professor's book disappear with the times. So he took the time to publish a book to share Strunk’s wisdom with the world. E. B. White cherished this book written by William Strunk. White refers to this little book and its content as a “rich deposit of gold.”
Though O'Brien's use of juxtaposition and shifts in point of view, he is able to not only show the “crazy powers of war”, but also conveys how war stories aren't true unless they are unbelievable. O’Brien talks about how believable war stories are made up as well as how “a true war story is never moral [and]... if [it]... seems moral, do not believe it” (O’Brien 65). The Vietnam war was a dark and horrific place for a lot of people, and O’Brien helps share those emotions through his “non-moral stories”. In one of the stories O’Brien describes a story where they are in middle of the jungle they heard “chamber music “ and “all these different voices…[then a] cocktail party” (O’Brien 71).