'Journey's End' by R.C. Sherriff is filled with very tense scenes throughout the play one in particular and the focus point on this essay is Act Two scene One, which endeavours to educate the audience about the true horrors of life at the front. Sherriff, who was wounded at Passchendaele in 1917, wrote from his experience of the war. He creates scenes that are very realistic, and because of his experiences, it helps the audience to believe the play more and understand the difficulties the soldiers faced. The title, 'Journey's End' creates a negative image immediately. It implies death, the end of life and the loss of innocence. Act Two scene one shows this in great depth, as Sherriff uses methods to re-create the overwhelming stress of trench warfare. He describes every aspect of the trenches, the guns and the whole life to emphasises the tragedy. With this understanding of the trenches, the reader are helped in imagining what it must have been like to live there. In the play, R.C Sheriff looks into the characters in the dug out, Fear within this play takes a dramatic impact on most of the play it also shows how different people in the same situation coped in the first world war, Humour, Alcohol, or Normality before the war. Act Two scene One looks into the emotions of the characters especially the officers, Stanhope, Osborne, Raleigh, Trotter, Hibbert and the cook Mason, an example of this is trotter he hides his emotions by being humours with mason as he keeps his mind on food ‘Trotter: well there’s nothing like a good fat bacon rasher when your as empty as I am, Mason: I’m glad you like it fat sir. Trotter: well, I like a bit O’ lean, too’, this shows that the writer is showing the reader that people dealt with stress and fear in different ways, however when comparing this to Stanhope he copes with all this stress and fear by drinking ‘sitting on the bed was Stanhope drinking a whisky’ this shows the audience how people dealt with stress and fear even if they were in completely different ways. R.C. Sheriff uses the character Osborne another officer in the dug out differently as Osborne is not a character in which shows the fear and stress in which he is going through instead he try’s to avoid a conversation about the war and tries to drag the conversation on to something else to remind himself of normality, his life before the war started ‘made me think about my garden…, Trotter:.
At the conclusion the reader is left with a vision of destruction of human life both literal and figurative that is absurd rather than tragic because the victims are not heroic figures reduced to misfortune, They are ordinary characters who meet a grotesque fate.
All Quiet on the Western Front shows the change in attitudes of the men before and
War slowly begins to strip away the ideals these boy-men once cherished. Their respect for authority is torn away by their disillusionment with their schoolteacher, Kantorek who pushed them to join. This is followed by their brief encounter with Corporal Himmelstoss at boot camp. The contemptible tactics that their superior officer Himmelstoss perpetrates in the name of discipline finally shatters their respect for authority. As the boys, fresh from boot camp, march toward the front for the first time, each one looks over his shoulder at the departing transport truck. They realize that they have now cast aside their lives as schoolboys and they feel the numbing reality of their uncertain futures.
Thinking that the war was just an ideal character. Convincing the reader to believe the boys didn't know the risk they were taking by being in this war. They way the boys viewed it, shows that, true their are some hard times in wars, but their minds are young and they thought it was just another thing to talk about. When they should have been taking things more serious, but thinking about the good parts helped them to keep a hold on their sanity. "They ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress to the future", was the beliefs of the boys after their friend Behn dies. Their generation thought that the authorities were going to look after, and take care of them, the authorities were thought of real highly by them. Until their friend passed away, then everything changed. "We had to realize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs", this is where they came to reality that, everybody was taking care of their selves, and didn't want anything to do with other peoples problems.
... horrors of war such as, his parents who still view war as glamorous and idealistic. War takes a heavy toll on soldiers who fight in it and in these dangerous moments anybody would have gone insane. It takes a very special type of soldier to be able to handle both the psychological and physical challenges that a soldier has to face in everyday battle. A soldier such as this must be capable of handling the sight of a mutilated comrade and not immediately chatter to pieces. The author conveys this message in his extreme use of words with negative connotation such as shells, typhus, dysentery, and trenches. In this portion of the novel a great deal of emphasis is placed on the word death which is repeated several times and standing on its own it holds a great deal of negative connotations. Therefore, due to the severity of the situation and the extensive use of words with negative connotations the overall tone of the novel appeared to be very depressing or serious. This selection also demonstrates just how mythical the character of war that many individuals who have not experienced the tragedy of battle believe to be true by illustrating just how appalling and grim war is in reality.
Imagine being in an ongoing battle where friends and others are dying. All that is heard are bullets being shot, it smells like gas is near, and hearts race as the times go by. This is similar to what war is like. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the narrator, Paul Baumer, and his friends encounter the ideals of suffering, death, pain, and despair. There is a huge change in these men; at the beginning of feel the same way about it. During the war the men experience many feelings, especially the loss of loved ones. These feelings are shown through their first experience at training camp, during the actual battles, and in the hospital. Training camp was the first actuality of what war was going to be like for the men. They thought that it would be fun, and they could take pride in defending their country. Their teacher, Kantorek, told them that they should all enroll in the war. Because of this, almost all of the men in the class enrolled. It was in training camp that they met their cruel corporal, Himelstoss.&nbs most by him. They have to lie down in the mud and practice shooting and jumping up. Also, these three men must remake Himelstoss’ bed fourteen times, until it is perfect. Himelstoss puts the young men through so much horror that they yearn for their revenge. Himelstoss is humiliated when he goes to tell on Tjaden, and Tjaden only receives an easy punishment. Training camp is as death and destruction. Training camp is just a glimpse of what war really is. The men do not gain full knowledge of war until they go to the front line. The front line is the most brutal part of the war. The front line is the place in which the battles are fought. Battles can only be described in one word- chaos. Men are running around trying to protect themselves while shooting is in the trench with an unknown man from the other side. This battle begins with shells bursting as they hit the ground and machine guns that rattle as they are being fired. In order to ensure his survival, Paul must kill the other man. First, Paul stabs the man, but he struggles for his life. He dies shortly after, and Paul discovers who he has killed. The man is Gerald Duval, a printer.&n Having to deal with killing others is one of the horrors of war. The men who are killed and the people who kill them could have been friends, if only they were on the same side. The other important battle leaves both Paul and Kropp with injuries.
opinions in Act 1, Scene 2. The aim of this is to build the suspense
we have no means of knowing if what he wrote was true or not. He may
Without Act 2 Scene 2 the whole play makes no sense. This is the scene
One must look at this poem and imagine what is like to live thru this experience of becoming so tired of expecting to die everyday on the battlefield, that one starts to welcome it in order to escape the anticipation. The effects of living day in and day out in such a manner creates a person who either has lost the fear of death or has become so frighten of how they once lived the compensate for it later by living a guarded life. The one who loses the fear for death ends up with this way of living in which they only feel alive when faced with death. The person in this poem is one who has lost their fear of death, and now thrives off coming close to it he expresses it when he states “Here is the adrenaline rush you crave, that inexorable flight, that insane puncture” (LL.6-7). What happens to this persona when he leaves the battlefield? He pushes the limit trying to come close to death to feel alive; until they push
As we know, the pretext of the play is the aftermath of a war, so I
As the boys witness death and mutilation all around them, any preconceived notion about the indoctrination, "the enemy" and the "rights and wrongs" of the conflict disappear, leaving them angry and perplexed. The story is not about heroism but about toil and futility and the divide between the idea of war and the real life and its values. The selected passages are full of violence and death and loss and a kind of perpetual suffering and terror that most of us have never and hopefully will never experience. Both authors ability to place the reader right there on the front line with the main character so vividly, not just in terms of what he physically experienced and witnessed All the complicated, intense and often completely numbed emotions that came along...
In my opinion Act 1 Scene 1 is the most important scene of the play
In this essay I will discuss Act 1 Scene 1, Act 3 Scene 1, Act 3 Scene
The Dramatic Importance of Act 1 Scenes 1 and 2 of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night