Preview

Illustrative Visual Imagery In Louisa May Alcott's Death Of A Soldier

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
236 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Illustrative Visual Imagery In Louisa May Alcott's Death Of A Soldier
It has been revealed by some that the best way to measure a person’s life is by its breath, not its length. Louisa May Alcott particularly focalizes on a soldier by the name of John. In the opening paragraph and from the author's point of view, she vividly depicts John dying. In John’s final hour and dearly loved amongst people, a group of men cluster around him, observing with sympathetic eyes.In Louisa May Alcott’s narrative, “Death of a Soldier”, she executes illustrative visual imagery and profound loaded words to develop a sense of solicitude.
Alcott employs illustrative visual imagery in order to set the scene. In paragraph one, she claims, “Even while he spoke, over his face I saw a gray veil falling that no human hand can lift” (Alcott

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Richard Wilbur's Juggler

    • 285 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Imagery is used in multiple points around the text and is possibly the most important poetic element. For instance in the text the speaker uses imagery such as “the boys stamp, the girls shriek, and the drum booms…” by adding this imagery the author is showing how caught up in the action everyone is. This quote reveals the atmosphere…

    • 285 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Generals Die in Bed is told by a soldier with no name, and the reader sees the war through his eyes. Charles Harrison creates a character who sometimes sees like a journalist and sometimes sees like a poet. The soldier’s vision extends beyond his immediate experience to register and respond to the whole extent of human suffering that the war creates.…

    • 10203 Words
    • 44 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Soldiers looked for ways to communicate their experience to those who were not soldiers. O”Brien, Komunyakka, and Owen are soldiers who each wrote a text describing soldiers at war from their personal point of view. O”Brien writes to get others to understand the physical, mental, and emotional things soldiers carried during war. Komunyakka writes to get others to understand how the soldiers must face death and reality at the same time while also having emotions as any other human does. Owen writes and exhibits his frustration with the condition that the soldiers were in and the point of view of people who haven’t experienced war first hand. All three soldiers wrote to better communicate with the world the conditions and reality to those…

    • 416 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    This book embodies all of the facets that go along with love and death, during a volatile time of war. O 'Brien captures the theme of emotional conflict and how strongly it affects soldiers in a brilliant way. By correlating mundane goods with intangibles like feelings and emotion, he successfully points out all of the angles of war that the lay person generally cannot comprehend. He compels the reader to understand not just the daily grind of war, but how the little things can bring important things in life into perspective. He digs under the surface of the tangible items to demonstrate a much greater meaning to these mens lives. In essence, the soldiers are defined by the things they…

    • 1236 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Kenneth Slessor, author of Beach Burial, was the Australian Official Correspondent in El Alamein, the Middle East during WWII. The author drew from his own experiences to write Beach Burial, a poem about the aftermath of a battle during WWII. It is a realistic and somber tribute to soldiers of all nations that died in the war. It illustrates how they are all united by one common enemy; death. It breaks the conventional war poem structure, as it is not a celebration of heroes, and shows no nationalistic or patriotic devotion. Instead, Kenneth Slessor has written about how soldiers lose their identity in war. He has chosen to start the poem lulling the readers into a false sense of calm, and by understating the calamity, we slowly realize he is talking about the dead soldiers, whether it be allies or enemies, being united.…

    • 578 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Analysis of Beach Burial

    • 1259 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Kenneth Slessor’s poignant poem, ‘Beach Burial’ contemplates on the improper and unfair burial that the Australian soldiers, who were at war with the Germans during World War 2, receive as a result of the fact that they could not get back home. The main idea that the poet was trying to get across was that as a result of the soldiers not being able to get a proper burial, they are not able to be recognized and are considered to be just another casualty of war: without honor or recognition. The poem emphasizes sadness on the completely useless waste of life; they are simply left how they had died and are now cared by only nature. In the poem, it appears as if these men are soldiers fighting a war at sea and as a result of a shipwreck in which they had died, or had simply been washed up on shore, they are left in the ocean being carried by the water back and forth. Slessor successfully shows this through techniques of assonance, onomatopoeia, rhythm and alliteration along with vivid images of bodies buried in burrows, using these techniques to transfer the emotions of calamity and sadness.…

    • 1259 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    During the Civil War the death is almost incomprehensible today. Between the years 1861 and 1865, the number of soldier fatalities is approximately equal the total American fatalities in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, Mexican War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. Faust first reports death in the role of the soldiers experiencing the “business end” of war. “The soldier needed to be both ready and willing to die; turning to culture, codes of masculinity, patriotism, and religion to fortify himself for that possibility of death” (5). War challenged means and practices that were not to be quickly undertaken, and since many soldiers were killed suddenly in the intense action of battle, their comrades made efforts to write condolence letters to the deceased’s loved ones. Many of these letters were sought to make absent loved ones “virtual witnesses to the dying moments they had been denied.” Faust also gives us valuable insight into the human psyche in the process of killing.…

    • 1804 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    A soldier’s suffering holds no refrain from anyone, no matter what title or identity they have. In both the worlds of soldiers in those in the poem entitled “losses” by Randall Jarrell and at Devon school in “A Separate Peace” by John Knowles, there are several relationships that they share. Both center around the lives of soldiers and soon to be soldiers during the cruel time of the second World War which was happening in Europe. Jarrell experiments with multiple identity in the combination of several speakers united in one, all wasted even before they could be conceded into the real experience of war. In the book World War II symbolizes many themes related to each other in the novel, from the arrival of adulthood to the triumph of the Evil…

    • 957 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Fatalities are part of every person’s life. To a normal citizen, death is often followed by sadness and grief. As portrayed in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, a soldier has to deal with the situation much differently. Death is portrayed in a negative light due to the fact that soldiers are greatly fearful of it and that they are forced to be unaffected by death. In order to cope with all the deaths he witnessed, O’Brien uses the retelling of war stories to heal from these traumatic events.…

    • 879 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The author uses imagery to allow the reader to gain a clearer picture of what he/she…

    • 545 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In the story these soldiers were effected emotionally in a great way. In story states, "They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to." In this quote we can see their fears and their happiness through these things. The way they couldn’t just get over the tragedies and terrors of war, their beliefs, the things that pull them apart and the things that bound them together. It really made me feel how emotional they felt in this troubling time whether it as good or bad.…

    • 304 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Imagery: “…weary, starving and sun-scorched, the earth under the blue sky and against the the prospect of the distant hills a velvet black expanse, with reed roofs, green trees, and, later, black-veiled shrubs and gates, barns, outhouses, and walls, rising here and there into the sunlight.” (book 1, chapter 15, page…

    • 612 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The author employs imagery throughout the poem by pairing vivid colors with other characters and figures to contribute to a more complex meaning. This visual imagery is found in line 3 when the speaker described…

    • 961 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Ambrose Bierce.

    • 791 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Bierce demonstrates the effects that war has on soldiers by showing death in many broad and vivid ways. One example of death being portrayed in a horrid was when a man couldn’t bare the to keep feeling his death and the pain that he became delusional while dying and started to dream of a way he could have gotten out of the dilemma he was in (An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge). Another example would be when the bravery of Lieutenant Herman Brayle also inspires his men to charge uncalled-for into definite death because they decide to that dying in a victorious death would be better than anything else (Incident of Resaca). These men are portrayed as heroes but really are just victims that are going through certain death. One example of death being portrayed as brave would be when a soldier is admired by many even though they all know he is about to die, but just the image of the soldier being so heroic causes the men’s admiration. The reader can truly see the many horrors that these soldiers have to pass through and the horrid deaths they have to go through from the vivid images that Ambrose Bierce writes.…

    • 791 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Twain informs the reader on the implications of a victory in war; implications that mean someone must lose. He provokes images of soldiers (people) being bloodied, beaten, and murdered on the war ridden fields. Twain prays, “help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells…help us to wring the hearts of their offending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst” (323). The patriotic men and women, however, choose to dismiss the consequences as simply the words of a…

    • 514 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays