In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the author utilizes imagery to describe many of the horrors that the soldiers are accustom to on a daily basis. Many of these horrors described lingered in my mind for some time after reading. I focused on the description made by Paul after an artillery bombardment. In this description, Paul sees his fellow comrades in serve pain, soldiers are holding their intestines in their hands, soldiers have their legs taken, and soldier hands are still hanging on to barbed wire with no body in sight. This is pure brutality.…
In the short story of Ambrose Bierce’s “Chickamauga,” the author uses imagery to contrast a child’s innocent immagination to the actual horrors of warfare. Bierce first conveys the picture by painting soldiers “singularly white… and gouted with red” as the child is reminded of “painted clowns” when he spots them. This is used to explain that the child thinks of the gruesomely faced soldiers as a source of entertainment for him. Furthermore, the innocence of the boy creates a disturbing atmosphere to the readers as he continues to play and ride on them. After the encounter, the child is then seen crossing “water gleamed with dashes of red” while he approaches a “blazing ruin of a dwelling.”…
Through the eyes of the narrator Paul Baumer and the graphic use of language, Remarque, exposes the reader to the gruesome reality of the war. When Paul and his fellow soldiers have just been under attack by the French and the men have been exposed to the true horror of the war, Paul observes his own comrade being carried off after the attack. “Haie Westhus is carried off with his back torn open; you can see the lung throbbing through the wound.....” (p.g 93). Readers are confronted with disturbing images which turn many people away from war. The war does not only destroy the soldiers but also the animals that are involved in the war. This is evident when the horses have been wounded in an attack. “The belly of one horse has been ripped open and its guts are trailing out... wounded horses who have bolted in terror, their wide- open mouths filled with all that pain.... it is the most despicable thing of all to drag animals into war” (p.g 44-45). Furthermore, the men mostly speak about fighting the French and see them not as the enemy but as the victim. The war is the enemy and the armies are the sufferers. “We’re out here defending our homeland. And yet the French are there defending their homeland as well” (p.g 140). This scene was purely about the injustice war and it is also about propaganda. The novel outlines the fact that the soldiers are against their parents and their teachers. “These people here are different, a kind I can’t really understand, that I envy and despise” (p.g…
As Bierce describes the soldiers he states, "Not all of this did the child note;" (127). Bierce describes the boys thoughts on the war victims as something from a circus, "Something too, perhaps, in their grotesque attitude and movements- reminded him of the painted clown whom he had seen last summer in the circus, and he laughed as he watched them. On they crept, these maimed and bleeding men, as heedless as he of the dramatic contrast between his laughter and their own ghastly gravity. To him it was a merry spectacle." (127). The boy compares the soldiers to his father's negroes, "He had seen his father's negroes creep upon their hands and knees for his amusement- had ridden them so, fancying them his horse. He now approached one of these crawling figures from behind and with an agile movement mounted it astride."…
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…
War is a battle of not only the physical but also the psychological. In the text, All quiet on the western front, by Enrich Maria Remarque, and the poem Homecoming, by Bruce Dawe, our understanding is challenged through various representations of war such as innocence, srvivl and grief.…
In the autumn of 1918, a 20 year old german soldier contemplates to himself: “Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear” (295). These last few thoughts happen right before this soldier, Paul Baumer, dies. In the book All Quiet On the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque creates the character of Paul Baumer in order to illustrate a generation full of men who are well known throughout our history, of what we all know of, the “Lost Generation.” About eight million soldiers lost their lives in combat and millions more were injured under the occasion of what we call today, “The Great War.” Remarque wrote this book about what these fighters at war deal with first hand; like with their teachers, families, and government. All Quiet On the Western Front expresses a story filled with the beauty of comradeship between each of the soldiers by finding solace in one another and the extenuating gestures of raillery throughout the book that help keep them from completely being taken over by the fear of death, or even war itself.…
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.…
British POW poem Oh! Lord! are three texts that effectively explore the horrific events of war as they convey distinctive experiences of war through the use of distinctively visuals. These three texts utilize various linguistic and visual techniques in order to impact the audience’s visualisation of the main characters and the horrific experiences of war they undergo. It is through these distinctively visuals that the responder is able to vividly formulate an image of these untold stories as the memories of friendship, reconciliation and pain of war experienced by the individuals are highlighted.…
War is often viewed as one of the most dangerous and brutal events ever created. It utterly destroys the humanity and mental state of soldiers fighting in the war. In All Quiet on the Western Front, a world renowned war novel by Erich Maria Remarque, the epigraph states that this novel “will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.” Staying true to this quote, Remarque tells of the horrors of World War I and fittingly describes the effects that war has on humans through the eyes of the protagonist, Paul Bäumer. In his epigraph Remarque says, “this book is to be neither an accusation, nor a confession, and least of all an adventure.” Except for a few notable exceptions,…
War is portrayed as heroic and the notion of fighting for one’s country is admirable and encouraged; however, war is not as glorious as it is portrayed. Soldiers who go to war not only risk their lives but also experience unmeasurable brutality. For example, Baümer goes to war at the ripe age of 19 and experiences events so horrifying that he is constantly reminded of the “grey, implacable muzzle...rifle which moves noiselessly before me whichever way I...turn my head” (Remarque 210). Baümer is continuously bombarded with these feelings both on and off the war front, and is traumatized even when safely hidden away in his shell hole; this reveals that even the slightest possibility of a bomb can create terrifying hallucinations. Soldiers are trained to be fierce, tough, and emotionless, however inside they are just as fragile and breakable as “little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go…
Despair, longing, entrapment, and instability seem to be encased in the brain of a soldier. The moral of life is familiarity, love, sex, happiness, and stability and the moral of the soldiers is seeking all of these. O’Brien writes his stories with such vivid detail and imagery that allows the reader to effectively interpret what is going through mind of each individual in the story. It allows the reader to see how in The Things they Carried, the soldiers longed for sex, drugs, and keeping the dead alive. However, the biggest and most quintessential problem that these soldiers dealt with was finding ways to be able to bear the scent and putridity of war, being able to escape from hell, and being able to love when the love was just a fantasy. All of these soldiers dealt with these problems differently. Notably, escaping reality should have not been the first choice in some cases. By escaping reality through sexual longing, it led to distraction. By escaping reality through the usage of drugs, it led to a decrease in focus and increase in volatility. However, by escaping reality by animating the dead, it led to inner peace. Finally, by these soldiers escaping reality, it led to the uniqueness in each individual story, and the solutions and problems that came with every day life in a war…
Consequently, the reader learns more about the personal, unpolished side of the life of a World War II soldier. Through a passage in the third chapter of the book, Leckie tells about other soldiers taking gold fillings from the mouths of the Japanese men they killed. “He would kick their jaws agape, peer into the mouth with all the solicitude of a Park Avenue dentist- careful, always careful not to contaminate himself by touch- and yank out all that glittered” (Leckie, 85). A glimpse of this unknown life is something that is only alluded to in other literary works of war. Leckie again shows an often hidden side of military life when he writes about his experience of being sent to the Marine Corps brig for being drunk while holding the role of sentry for his fellow marine, Chuckler; for this offense, he is sentenced to five days without bread and water, as well as being made a private. “The brig receives you, and you are nothing; even the clothes you wear belong to the brig and bear its mark; your very belt and razor blades have been entrusted to the brig warden- you have nothing- you are nothing (Leckie, 172-173). Through this excerpt, Leckie offers an inside look at military life that readers otherwise would not know about or…
War evokes many different emotions for some soldiers. Some are drafted and demanded to serve, others volunteer their lives for the sake of not being titled as cowards. Some get to fight another day, some don't, others get captured and become prisoners or hostages. But one thing is certain, for those who have experienced war know first hand that it has the power to change you as a person. In the short stories “Guests of the Nation“ and “The Things They Carried,” authors Frank O’Connor and Tim O’Brien share the same central idea of the horrible effects of war. Both stories are about a young male soldier who faces the true reality of war as well as the emotional and impacts these experiences leave with them. Though the…
In his writing, “From Realism to Virtual Reality,” H. Bruce Franklin describes the different methods people used to promote and capture the elements of war by comparing how art, literature, and technology describe the emotions associated with it. He also expresses his views on how these different methods of expression alter the way a nation would cogitate on the purpose and meaning of their war when he states, “Prior to the civil war, visual images of America’s wars were almost without exception expressions of romanticism and nationalism. Paintings, lithographs, woodcuts, and statues displayed a glorious saga of thrilling American heroism from the Revolution and Mexican War. … Using words as a medium, writers had few limitations on how they…