To be or not to be (Human)
In Han Kang’s, Human Acts there are several highly graphic and shocking descriptions of the human body that beg the readers to problematize and question what it means to be humanized. Throughout her novel there are several instances where humans are being referred to as bloodied, convulsing, animal like sacks being thrown around without purpose and such descriptions may be interpreted by some readers as clearly dehumanizing. However, even though such wording may elicit such a response, the text is in fact humanizing the characters being killed and tossed by so accurately describing the human condition and all of the things the body does strictly because following trauma, living as ghosts because humans feel and react.
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However, even though the terms being used are grotesque and seem to describe beasts, the very conditions being described are so humanly in their nature that it cannot possibly be all dehumanizing. In this chapter, the protagonist is the fallen friend of Dong-Ho named, Jeong-dae, describing his experience as a soul post-death and the scene that followed his murder. The imagery he looks down as a fallen soul he describes in detail, “I’d lost so much blood that my heart finally stopped, the blood had continued to drain from my body, leaving the skin of my face transparent as writing paper” (51). The narrator himself describes his appearance as comparable to objects rather than a human and thus the interpretation that these words and scenes are dehumanizing is easy to understand. However, blood, heart, skin, face, body, even stench from the deceased, the limpness of a dead body, the convulsions that follow a blunt force trauma, all of these are human features and characteristics. These are the reactions and affects of trauma that any human would experience and it is clearly distinct form that of an animal because it is able to be talked about an communicated in language form souls or from others seeing it. Through these descriptions and graphic scenes, the author is humanizing the victims and allowing all readers to hear and feel the horrors that is the effects of war and violence on the human
Dien Cai Dau by Yusef Komunyakaa is a collection of poems based on Komunyakaa’s personal experiences of the Vietnam War. He describes his experiences and observations in a way that isn’t as gritty and raw as some veterans, but still shows the horrors of war and the struggle to survive. What makes Komunyakaa’s work different is the emotion he uses when talking about the war. He tells it like it is and puts the reader in the soldiers’ shoes, allowing them to camouflage themselves and skulk around the jungles of Vietnam from the very first lines of “Camouflaging the Chimera.” Komunyakaa’s title Dien Cai Dau means “crazy” in Vietnamese and is an appropriate title based on the mind set of this veteran soldier. Two common themes I have found in Komunyakaa’s
In this chapter, O’Brien contrasts the lost innocence of a young Vietnamese girl who dances in grief for her slaughtered family with that of scarred, traumatized soldiers, using unique rhetorical devices
Pain and suffering is a common element used as a tool in literary works such as, A Rumor of War. In the book, Caputo describes the horrendous sights that he saw while serving in his tours overseas. He vividly recalls how he felt while having to write death reports about soldiers, “All reports had to be written in that clinical, euphemistic language military prefers to simple English. If, say, a marine been shot through the guts, I could not write "shot through the guts" or even "shot through the stomach"; no, I had to say; "GSW" ( gunshot wound ) "through and through, abdomen." Shrapnel wounds were called "multiple fragment lacerations," and the phrase for dismemberment, one of my very favorite phrases, was "traumatic amputation."” This was very important to the reader as it showed the deaths that Caputo had to witness, and actually observe close up. All of this helped to show the pain and suffering of those who died on those fields, and Caputo’s pain in just having to do the book work concerned with the vast amount of KIA’s, WIA’s and MIA’s. Death, is a major theme used to convey the element of pain within these literary works and other works on wars throughout time.
The narrator in “The Things They Carried” deals with the subjective conditions of war. Throughout the story, straining emotions often brought O’Brien’s teams emotions, especially after a death, causes a “crying jag” with a “heavy-duty hurt” (O’Brien 1185). The fury of emotion associated with death begins to erode the sharp minds of the soldiers and become mentally effective. 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 dies” 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 taken place in the psyche of the narrator is repressed directly by the war. The protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is also faced with the task of coping with mental
The chapter “The Man I Killed” includes an in depth examination of the dead Vietnam man. Describing all of the man’s new physical attributes from a grenade explosion. “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman's, his nose was undamaged…” For a full page, O’Brien reminisces about the picture of the man that is now engrained in his head. He further analyzes all of these features deducing and making assumptions about personal details of the life of the dead man. “He would have been taught that to defend the land was a man's highest duty and highest privilege. He had accepted this. It was never open to question. Secretly, though, it also frightened him. He was not a fighter.” This chapter is also extremely influential to O’Brien, who uses imagery as a way to grasp his actions. O’Brien does not try to dull his pain or separate himself from the dead man. Giving the dead man a back-story only makes him more human making this kill so much less detached and much more personal. Kiowa tries to help O’Brien justify his actions, but O’Brien is not focused on the
The mind is a very powerful tool when it is exploited to think about situations out of the ordinary. Describing in vivid detail the conditions of one after his, her, or its death associates the mind to a world that is filled with horrific elements of a dark nature.
“Rolling Stone recently published photos online of American troops posing with dead Afghans. In addition to posing with the corpses, "these soldiers — called the 'kill team ' — also took body parts as trophies”(Less). Beyond Intractability explains this as “In severe cases, dehumanization makes the violation of generally accepted norms of behavior regarding one 's fellow man seem reasonable, or even necessary.” (Maiese). The crowd in A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings that inflicts these torturous atrocities on the old man, cannot seem to understand that he is human. By the couple locking him in their chicken coop over night, they had stripped him of his freedom and therefore his rights as a human. The crowd that came to see an angel, found instead an attraction somewhat like they would find at a circus. Marquez shows these tortures of someone helpless, to open the eyes of readers at what dehumanization does.
...f his stay in Vietnam, he had wished he had never heard that word. He became horrified by this war. The once proud American was no longer so proud of his country. The Vietnam War was not like the movies he saw as a child; “the screams were real, and when men fell down they didn’t get up, and the sticky wet substance splattering against your leg was somebody’s intestines” (Ehrhart, 246). Although he had his family and friends around him upon his return home, it seemed that Ehrhart was alone in “The World.” Unless someone was there, they could not possibly understand the thoughts and memories he had to live with. The gruesome memories from Vietnam had permeated him completely; they engraved into his mind and would undoubtedly scar him forever.
In Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, he provides the reader with a fictional account of the Bhopal Disaster through the eyes of a deformed teenager in a fictional town named Khaufpor. This teenager calls himself ‘Animal’ because his deformity bent his spine to the point where he must walk on all fours, making him feel inhuman. With his mother and father dead, he accepts the name as his own and denies his own humanity. Although Animal tries to separate himself from his humanity because of the pain it causes him, he is forced to accept his humanity through his friends’ guidance and the inner and external conflicts that he faces meaning that humanity is unavoidable.
We understand that the author’s purpose is to show how degraded he feels by the events that took place that morning in Burma.
War is cruel. The Vietnam War, which lasted for 21 years from 1954 to 1975, was a horrific and tragic event in human history. The Second World War was as frightening and tragic even though it lasted for only 6 years from 1939 to 1945 comparing with the longer-lasting war in Vietnam. During both wars, thousands of millions of soldiers and civilians had been killed. Especially during the Second World War, numerous innocent people were sent into concentration camps, or some places as internment camps for no specific reasons told. Some of these people came out sound after the war, but others were never heard of again. After both wars, people that were alive experienced not only the physical damages, but also the psychic trauma by seeing the deaths and injuries of family members, friends or even just strangers. In the short story “A Marker on the Side of the Boat” by Bao Ninh about the Vietnam War, and the documentary film Barbed Wire and Mandolins directed by Nicola Zavaglia with a background of the Second World War, they both explore and convey the trauma of war. However, the short story “A Marker on the Side of the Boat” is more effective in conveying the trauma of war than the film Barbed Wire and Mandolins because of its well-developed plot with well-illustrated details, and its ability to raise emotional responses from its readers.
One of the worst things about war is the severity of carnage that it bestows upon mankind. Men are killed by the millions in the worst ways imaginable. Bodies are blown apart, limbs are cracked and torn and flesh is melted away from the bone. Dying eyes watch as internal organs are spilled of empty cavities, naked torso are hung in trees and men are forced to run on stumps when their feet are blown off. Along with the horrific deaths that accompany war, the injuries often outnumber dead men. As Paul Baumer witnessed in the hospital, the injuries were terrifying and often led to death. His turmoil is expressed in the lines, “Day after day goes by with pain and fear, groans and death gurgles. Even the death room I no use anymore; it is too small.” The men who make it through the war take with them mental and physical scarification from their experiences.
...h narrators see more horror than they could imagine was possible. Each day is quite likely to be their last and they are under no illusions what sort of horrific death could be lurking over the top of the next attack.
Given the fact that nature is known for sneering in man’s face, it is no surprise that it also very dispassionate towards people. War Is Kind use the line “A field where a thousand corpses lie.” to describe the battlefields of the war. When most people talk about the casualties of war they are addressed as soldiers, whereas the poem uses corpses. This takes away any honor or identity from these dead bodies, showing that nature has a way of making death very impersonal. Understanding this concept can help grasp a more intricate comprehension of the following scene in “The Open Boat.” The Oiler dies in a very tragic way, and when they finally bring his body to shore it is described as “A quiet and wet shape” (Crane, Pg.15) In a 5 word sentence any identity he had, vanished. This is a great example of how impersonal nature gets when man dies, stripping them of any ounce of dignity they had. War Is Kind shares many of the same ideas that “The Open Boat” does and by getting grasp of what is being said in the poem, will lead to a greater understanding
Wiesel uses the sustained figurative language using words such as ‘dogs’ and other animalistic references throughout the text to demonstrate how in the eyes of the soldiers they are no longer seen as people. ‘You will all be shot like dogs’. Descriptive imagery is also used to explain how the civilians were also inhumane to the prisoners, with a description of the prisoners being ‘beasts of prey unleashed…sharpening their teeth and nails’ as the citizens spurred it on. This explains the inhumanity that not only the s...