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The Impact of World War I on the United States
The Impact of World War I on the United States
The social and political impact on the U.S. of WW1
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The TV blasts about defending democracy, while bomb blasts shake homes and break bones. Those who come back can’t be heard above all the noise. In the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut details the unconventional experiences of Billy Pilgrim in World War II and his role as an unlikely survivor after the war. The poem Dulce et Decorum est by Wilfred Owen and John Kerry’s testimony before the Senate also discuss lesser-known experiences of war, describing the dissonance between firsthand experiences and other accounts. These works show how the media creates a narrative of noble and patriotic conflict to garner support for war efforts, forming misconceptions that invalidate soldiers’ experiences.
First, media portrayal of war is honorable
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Part of it reads, “...we have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles”(Vonnegut 186). Here, Truman frames dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima as winning a battle in scientific discovery and innovation in order to stir patriotic sentiments. Furthermore, the statement intentionally omits descriptions of Hiroshima, minimizing the effects of bombing on Japanese people. Additionally, Truman discusses “[German] hopes to enslave the world”(Vonnegut 186) in his statement, using nationalist hatred to gather support for the bombing. Although the attack on Hiroshima was immensely devastating, Truman focuses on building patriotism to get the political support that he needs. Next, in the last lines of Dulce et Decorum est, Owen explicitly states that dying for a country is an “old lie” (Owen). Owen believes war can never actually be honorable, and is only believed to be so due to the lies of people …show more content…
In Dulce et Decorum est, Owen offers a counter-narrative to the glorious tale of war offered by his country. His description of “...under a green sea, I saw him drowning / in all my dreams” (Owen) tells of a soldier dying from poison gas and seeing “His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin”(Owen). In WWI, it was common for soldiers to come back having seen many grotesque deaths. Here, Owen addresses the potential trauma WWI soldiers experienced when seeing morbid things. Owen’s inability to suppress the images of the soldier’s death is literal and affects his mental health. However, the last lines of his poem also discuss“The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori”(Owen). While gore and death exist and impact the mental health of soldiers, they’re unaddressed in Owen’s society and ignored to create their own ideas of a “glorious” war. This purposeful refusal to address soldiers’ trauma and gory nature of WWI warfare marginalizes those soldiers affected by traumatic experiences and undiagnosed PTSD. While large-scale, explicit refusal to address trauma causes invalidation, individuals influenced by misconceptions can also discredit soldiers’ experiences. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim’s daughter Barbara doesn’t believe her father is traumatized by the war and writes off his Tralfamadorian ramblings as pure madness. Barbara, “thought her father was senile... because of damage to
Kurt Vonnegut places his experiences and his views in the text. He begins the book by stating, “All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true...I’ve changed all of the names.” Viewing war as a sen...
Marked by two world wars and the anxiety that accompanies humanity's knowledge of the ability to destroy itself, the Twentieth Century has produced literature that attempts to depict the plight of the modern man living in a modern waste land. If this sounds dismal and bleak, it is. And that is precisely why the dark humor of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. shines through our post-modern age. The devastating bombing of Dresden, Germany at the close of World War II is the subject of Vonnegut's most highly acclaimed work, Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death. Vonnegut's experience as an American POW in Dresden fuels the narrative that unconventionally defines his generation through the life and death of Billy Pilgrim. The survival of Billy Pilgrim at Dresden and his re-entry to the shell-shocked world reveal a modern day journey of the anti-hero. Vonnegut's unusual style and black satire provide a refreshing backdrop for a vehement anti-war theme and enhance his adept ability to depict the face of humanity complete with all of its beauty and blemishes. Likewise, Vonnegut adds his own philosophy concerning time, our place in it, and connection (or disconnection) to it and one other. Perhaps the most crucial step in understanding this intriguing work is to start with its title, which holds the key to Vonnegut's most prevailing theme.
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., is the tale of a World War II soldier, Billy Pilgrim. His wartime experiences and their effects lead him to the ultimate conclusion that war is unexplainable. To portray this effectively, Vonnegut presents the story in two dimensions: historical and science-fiction. The irrationality of war is emphasized in each dimension by contrasts in its comic and tragic elements. The historical seriousness of the Battle of the Bulge and the bombing of Dresden are contrasted by many ironies and dark humor; the fantastical, science-fiction-type place of Tralfamadore is, in truth, an outlet for Vonnegut to show his incredibly serious fatalistic views. The surprising variations of the seriousness and light-heartedness allow Vonnegut to show effectively that war is absurd.
In one of the greatest war novels All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque is about a soldier Paul Bäumer who was enrolled into the army with his classmates where they had to face horrendous obstacles and had to see vivid consternations. wistfully after all Paul went through from watching his comrades die in combat, he had died near the ending of World War 1. Paul was a person who is repulsed by the idea of war. The brutality of war that he had experienced with his companions has caused them to lose faith and have a special hostility to war. Paul would've wanted the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” to show the people who are out of harm's way that war is not what it seems. There are casualties from soldiers choking
Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five, presents the idea that the Billy views war differently from the rest of the public. While the rest of the world sees war as an event occurring on the other side of the war. Billy sees how devastating and senseless they are.
After an event of large magnitude, it still began to take its toll on the protagonist as they often “carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die” during the war (O’Brien 1187). The travesties that occurred with the brutality of war did not subside and began to affect those involved in a deeply emotional way. The multitude of disastrous happenings influenced the narrator to develop a psychological handicap to death by being “afraid of dying” although being “even more afraid to show it” (O’Brien 1187). The burden caused by the war creates fear inside the protagonist’s mind, yet if he were to display his sense of distress it would cause a deeper fear for those around him, thus making the thought of exposing the fear even more frightening. The emotional battle taking place in the psyche of the narrator is directly repressed by the war.
Vivid imagery is one way with which writers protest war. Crane uses imagery to glorify, and shortly thereafter demean and undercut war, through the use of imagery, by placing positive and negative images of war close to eachother. “Blazing flag of the regiment,” and “the great battle God,” are placed before “A field where a thousand corpses lie.” (A) These lines’ purposes are to put images into the reader’s head, of how great war may appear, and then displaying that there are too many casualties involved with it. In Dulce Et Decorum Est, a man is described dyin...
Although Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five to be science-fictionalized, the nature of the unreliability of the protagonist leads to the reader’s understanding that a true war story isn’t necessarily one that is always factual. This, as well as a lack of a clear moral and the contradictory aspects of the novel, coincides with Tim O’Brien’s indicators for a true war story, as one is described in “How to Tell a True War Story”. These two works of literature are very different and were published around 30 years apart, which proves that war is an idea that is communicated through very different means.
Notably, imagery in “Buttons” and “Dulce et Decorum Est” illustrate to the reader the authentic side of battle that soldiers experience first hand. The majority of “Buttons” is spent showing the reader the light and airy version of war that those not in battle practice. The Narrator uses words such as “ laughing” and “sunny” (Sandburg 5) to describe the atmosphere of the newspaper office. However, the narrator then goes on to state the horrific truth of war with phrases such as “twist on their bodies…gasping of wounds…death in their throats” (Sandburg 10-13). The depiction of a massacre like scene is used to reveal to reader the authentic side of war, parallel to the use of imagery in “Dulce et Decorum Est”. The narrator of “Dulce et Decorum Est” expresses the horrendous and disturbing version of war with phrases such as “Froth corrupted lungs…obscene as cancer…white eyes writhing in his face” (Owen 19-23) to portray the real side of war. The narrator shows how awful and unsettling combat actual is through vivid illustrations to convey to the reader that war is not honorable, nor revering. Both “Buttons” and “Dulce et Decorum Est” ...
In Hedges' first chapter of the book titled, "The Myth of War," he talks about how the press often shows and romanticizes certain aspects of war. In war there is a mythic reality and a sensory reality. In sensory reality, we see events for what they are. In mythic reality, we see defeats as "signposts on the road to ultimate victory" (21), Chris Hedges brings up an intriguing point that the war we are most used to seeing and hearing about (mythic war )is a war completely different than the war the soldiers and journalists experience ( sensory war), a war that hides nothing. He states, "The myth of war is essential to justify the horrible sacrifices required in war, the destruction and death of innocents. It can be formed only by denying the reality of war, by turning the lies, the manipulation, the inhumanness of war into the heroic ideal" (26). Chris Hedges tries to get the point across that in war nothing is as it seems. Through his own experiences we are a...
It is evident that the occurrence of war throughout history has made a lasting impression on soldiers and civilians alike. This has been expressed over the years through different works of literature. The cost of war to the individual is illustrated in “The Red Convertible” by Louise Erdrich, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, and “The Shawl” by Cynthia Ozick because each story shows some element of mental, emotional, and physical toll.
Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, uses the biblical allusion of Lot’s wife looking back on the destroyed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to parallel the story of Billy Pilgrim during the war and his experience after, when he returns to the United States. Although the reference is brief, it has profound implications to the portrayal of America during World War II, especially the bombing of Dresden. Although Lot’s wife’s action dooms her to turn into a pillar of salt, the narrator emphasizes her choice to indicate the importance of being compassionate and having hindsight. Ultimately, Slaughterhouse-Five critiques the American social attitude to disregard the unjust nature of its actions in World War II. Furthermore, Vonnegut’s novel explicates this by elucidating the horrors of war—especially in regard to the massacre of innocence, how it leaves the soldiers stagnant when they return home, and leaves them empty with an American Dream that cannot be fulfilled. In order to combat violence, the novel stresses that one must hold human life to a higher value and be compassionate towards others; America must acknowledge its mistakes so that the soldiers who fought and died for her so that the soldiers may move on.
The three narratives “Home Soil” by Irene Zabytko, “Song of Napalm” by Bruce Weigl, and “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen all have the same feelings of war and memory, although not everyone experiences the same war. Zabytko, Weigl, and Owen used shifting beats, dramatic descriptions, and intense, painful images, to convince us that the horror of war far outweighs the devoted awareness of those who fantasize war and the memories that support it.
War has been a relevant theme in literature and culture throughout history, slowly desensitizing the mass to the gruesome and painful outcomes of war itself. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is an anti-war novel with influences from the author’s life experiences.
Collecting evidences, gathering recourses, and providing reliable insights of a historical event are certainly not some easy tasks to perform for an author who has no first-hand experience of such event. Nevertheless, it is even more challenging for authors to re-organize, recount, and represent traumatic war-time memories to a body of audience with no direct experience of the intensely dangerous confrontations, especially belligerent experiences that happened abroad. To convey the anxiety and trauma resulted from extreme violence, moral conflicts and physio-psychological damages without unconsciously marginalizing any particular historical event, authors who write about traumatic experiences must be cautious when they try to visually and mentally