IGCSE World Literature
Centre name: Island School, Hong Kong.
Centre number: HK010
Candidate name: Ada Ytterdal
Candidate number: 5231
Coursework Assignment 1:
Critical Essay
Question Title: How effectively do the authors of ‘Mid-Term Break’ and ‘War Photographer’ explore people’s feelings in the face of death?
Word Count: 1,236
‘Mid-Term Break’ by Seamus Heaney and ‘War Photographer’ Carol Ann Duffy both explore people’s feelings in the face of death. Heaney depicts the death of his younger brother. ‘Mid-Term Break’ is written from his point of view and shows the emotional response of the people around him. Duffy creates a grim mood of a war photographer having just returned from capturing the horrors of war. The poem
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The fact that Heaney uses the word “corpse” instead of the person 's actual name shows that he is not ready to let go of his brother. In addition to being ‘paler’, the body is described as “stanched and bandaged”. These descriptions take away the humanity from the body. It also suggests that they tried to save him, but were clearly unable. Although ‘the bumper knocked him clear’, he did not have any signs of violence on him, except for a ‘poppy bruise on his left temple’. Heaney used poppies to symbolize remembrance and the fact that his brother had a brief but significant impact on people’s lives. This was achieved through using the phrase ‘a four foot box, a foot for every year’. This phrase tells us clearly that his brother was 4 years old, signifying his short life. At the wedding there were many people who had gathered to grieve for the young boy who they all loved, showing that despite his age, he had made an impact on many peoples …show more content…
Through the process of developing the photos, he views himself as ‘a priest preparing to intone a mass’. The photographer compares his dark room to a ‘church’. He travels around the world to witness and capture terrible crimes committed against humanity, bringing them back to us in still images. The phrase ‘spools of suffering’ includes both a metaphors and assonance and conveys the effects of war. The photographer recalls an event where he ‘sought approval without words’, this shows the amount of respect he has for the people around him. ‘In back and white’ has an ambiguous meaning. It relates to the photographs, which the photographer is developing, but also the contrast between good and evil.
The people back home in ‘rural England’, who are not effected by the death and devastation of war, are presented as being uncaring and unconcerned. The war photographer has taken hundreds of photographs, all depicting the horrors and dismay of war. Although the war photographer has travelled to all the troubled countries around the world such as ‘Belfast, Beirut, Phnom Penh’, he still seems happy to return ‘home again’. The photographer’s life in ‘rural’ England creates contrasts to the panic and chaos of the war
Death is something that occurs often in a war due to the violence and dangerous areas. Everyone takes on the thought of someone dying in different ways, whether they maintained a close relationship with the person or not guilt could become an instant reaction of the persons' death because of a feeling of maybe being responsible for the death that occurred. The thought of maybe being responsible for one of the soldiers that you have spent day night serving with could leave an enormous amount of guilt in one person. When witnessing a death or anything traumatic it is easy to blame someone else or even yourself for the tragic accident. Multiple characters in the book The Things They Carried demonstrated the guilt and responsibility of another
Tillman, in Army fatigues, sits in a tree with an assault rifle in hand, waiting for someone to test his shooting skills. The landscape behind him is brown and looks dead and lifeless, just like his fallen comrades.one feels Tillman’s demeanor in the photograph, but whether he is focused on the seriousness of war or the fear of imminent death we will never know (SI “Remember” n. pag.). To appeal to their audience, this cover uses specific tactics. The fatigues induce a sense of patriotism that hits home with the American audience.
Similarly, imagery and setting are contrasted with the ugliness of war. Finally, a variety of language techniques coalesce to create extremely emotive language, exploring the gruelling and emotionally damaging nature of war’s conditions. Malouf’s application of third person perspective, serves to convey the influence of patriotism in times of war. Malouf conveys in the early chapters of ‘Fly Away Peter’ his idea that Australia was a young but patriotic nation in 1914, the year in which the text’s events take place.
Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent, has a memory overflowing with the horrors of many battlefields and the helplessness of those trapped within them. He applies this memory to write War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, where he tutors us in the misery of war. To accomplish this goal, Hedges uses impactful imagery, appeals to other dissidents of war and classic writers, and powerful exemplification. Throughout his book, Hedges batters the readers with painful and grotesque, often first-hand, imagery from wars around the globe. He begins the book with his experience in Sarajevo, 1995.
For the duration of his essay “The Stranger in the Photo is Me”, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and professor Donald M. Murray depicts his train of thought while flipping through an old family photo album. While describing his experience, Murray carries the reader through the story of his childhood, describing snapshots of some of his favorite memories growing up. Throughout the piece, he shifts back and forth between a family oriented, humorous tone and a nostalgic, regretful one and by doing so, he parallels the true experience of looking through a family photo album. Murray expresses a more serious tone while reflecting on a certain photograph of him in uniform from the beginning of World War II and goes on to explain how in his opinion,
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.
Both Ted Hughes and Wilfred Owen present war in their poems “Bayonet Charge” and “Exposure”, respectively, as terrifying experiences, repeatedly mentioning the honest pointlessness of the entire ordeal to enhance the futility of the soldiers' deaths. Hughes’ “Bayonet Charge” focuses on one person's emotional struggle with their actions, displaying the disorientating and dehumanising qualities of war. Owen’s “Exposure”, on the other hand, depicts the impacts of war on the protagonists' nation, displaying the monotonous and unending futility of the situation by depicting the fate of soldiers who perished from hypothermia, exposed to the horrific conditions of open trench warfare before dawn. The use of third-person singular pronouns in “Bayonet
Joan Didion is an author who was part of the New Journalism movement during the 1960s and ‘70s which was a change from the traditional styles (Rustin 1). As a member of the New Journalism movement, Didion used stories and real-life events to explore sensational events that occurred in the sixties and seventies. Using imagery to centralize her ideas, Didion boldly informs the reader on the subject of morality and gets him/her engaged with the text. Didion’s use of gruesome imagery resonates with the idea of survival-based morality because in the most physically painful and emotional situations, people are defined by the actions they take. Joan Didion positions her view by providing symbolic imagery including the blazing desert, the nurse who travels one-hundred and eighty miles of mountain road for an injured girl, the sheriff’s deputies who search for a kid, and the painting by Hieronymous Bosch illustrating the diverse concept of morality, all which construct the exaggeratingly annoyed tone of the essay and deliver an idea that survival is central to morality.
Regret is a powerful emotion that has the ability to scar someone for the rest of their life. Moments of regret can come from relationships, self-made decisions and life changing events. The idea of regret also applies to “A Marker on the Side of the Boat” by Bao Ninh and “On the Rainy River” by Tim O’Brien. Although these two literary pieces are very different in many ways, both authors describe the experience of the Vietnam War as a time of regretful decisions that negatively impacted people of both the American side and the Vietnamese side. Both authors tell a story about a character that recalls of flashbacks of the war, where they grieve over the past decisions that have affected them for the rest of their life.
We live in a world where we have to hide to make love, while violence is practiced in broad daylight. John Lennon. Based on his own reading and reflection, Bruce Dawe constructs his attitudes towards war in his poems, Homecoming and Weapons Training, believing it to be lacking sense historically and ultimately futile. By specifically addressing an Australian cultural context, the poet exposes a universal appeal in that the insensitivity and anonymity are common attitudes towards soldiers during war. Dawe clearly expresses his ‘anti-war sentiment’ through his use of language and imagery as he examines the dehumanising aspects of war and its brutal reality.
In war, there is no clarity, no sense of definite, everything swirls and mixes together. In Tim O’Brien’s novel named “The Things They Carried”, the author blurs the lines between the concepts like ugliness and beauty to show how the war has the potential to blend even the most contrary concepts into one another. “How to Tell a True War Story” is a chapter where the reader encounters one of the most horrible images and the beautiful descriptions of the nature at the same time. This juxtaposition helps to heighten the blurry lines between concepts during war. War photography has the power to imprint a strong image in the reader’s mind as it captures images from an unimaginable world full of violence, fear and sometimes beauty.
With war photography a photo isn’t just a image it is a trace of reality, an experience that was captured ,or even a moment. War photography is like an art that gives importance to real life events and also makes them worth remembering after you take them. When you take a photo it 's about telling the reality of that photo, about showing what others may not see, to make them aware of it though the images come from the media. However, when the photo serves as informing the world we find ourselves facing the world to see if it 's true or if it 's not true. If people could be there to see it for themselves, the fear and grief for just one time in their life, they would understand that nothing is worth letting things get to the point to where people get hurt but everyone can’t be there, so that 's why photographers go there to show them, to reach out, or to grab them and make them realize what 's happening to the world or to even pay attention to what is going on, to create a powerful picture to overcome the effects of the mass media and to shake people out of their indifferences that they have against each other.
Using distinctively visual, sensory language and dramatic devices in texts allows the reader and audience to view as well as participate and relate to different emotions. In the fictional play “Shoe Horn Sonata” written by John Misto, 1995, Misto sets the scene by using dramatic devices to address the extremely confronting circumstances that the protagonists, Sheila and Bridie experience. Similarly, in the poem “Beach Burial” by Kenneth Slessor, 1944, Slessor too uses extremely strong visual language on the subject of war to overcome the gruesome realities of the subject matter. Misto’s play “Shoe Horn Sonata” shares the impacting journey two young women are forced to face, spending 1287 days in captivity in a Sumatran war camp, during world war two.
The novel focuses on coping with the death and horror of war. It also speaks volumes about the true nature of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the never-ending struggle of dealing with it. In the
The war novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque depicts one protagonist, Paul, as he undergoes a psychological transformation. Paul plays a role as a soldier fighting in World War I. His experiences during the war are not episodes the average person would simply experience. Alternatively, his experiences allow him to develop into a more sophisticated individual. Remarque illustrates these metamorphic experiences to expose his theme of the loss of not only people’s lives but also innocence and tranquility that occurs in war.