“The island was nothing more than a sandy spit….every inch of the camp was an ashen, otherworldly gray, reminding one POW of the moon. There were no birds anywhere” (Hillenbrand, 236.)
The details of this quote show the lack of hope the prisoners had as they saw the prison and the surrounding island. The use of the gray symbolizes a bleak future for the prisoners, while the mention of the moon shows how the prisoners would rather be anywhere but Omori. The author makes sure to mention that there are no birds around, foreshadowing the coming of Mutsuhiro Watanabe, or as the POWs knew him, the Bird. The main purpose of this quote is to display the sense of dread that these prisoners must have felt as they walked through the place where they would be tortured for the next few years.gh the men
“It was absolutely dark and absolutely silent, save for the chattering of Phil’s teeth. The ocean was a flat calm. A rough, rasping tremor ran through the men. The sharks were rubbing their backs along the raft bottoms (Hillenbrand, 135-6.)”
The details of the quote show how frightened and cold and lonely these men were. The author included the sharks to represent the constant and very real threat of death and the problem of survival against these unlikely odds. The description of the ocean as calm relates to the situation like the calm before a storm in the sense that these men’s time on those rafts was likely the lesser of all evils that they had to endure from the day of the crash to the day they were liberated. Overall, the author chose to detail this setting because it gives depth and adds slight drama to the situation rather than just telling the reader that it was cold and there were sharks.
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