Captian Vere's reactions to Billy Budd in Billy Budd
When Captain Vere says “Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!” his attitude towards Billy Budd changes from one of paternal concern and personal respect to one in which he has set aside his personal thoughts and feelings for the sake of his nation. Each sentence represents this dichotomy by indicating his sentiment towards Billy. In the first, Billy is “an angel of God” who has “struck” Claggart dead, in a righteous manner. In the second sentence, “the angel must hang,” indicates that no matter Billy’s intentions or nature, his act is a crime against his country.
Vere, between Billy’s outburst and his own divided exclamation, acts maniacally, but methodically. He follows procedure for confirming Claggart’s condition, but does not refer to the event in terms of its secular implications. Instead, he calls it the “divine judgment on Ananias.” His behavior throughout this passage, which extends for only about a page, is frantic and disturbed. He acts as a “military disciplinarian” towards the disturbed Billy, ordering him to stay in his stateroom, but when the “prudent surgeon” enters the room, he acts with haste, interrupting his salute.
Yet, when the baffled surgeon confirms Vere’s worst fears, he becomes “motionless, standing absorbed in thought.” He then convulsively compares Billy to the Angel of Death. Here, Vere is beginning to recognize the consequences of this event, and the necessary actions he must take as captain. Captain Vere returns to his intellectual, patriotic nature, as he becomes again the man whose “settled convictions were as a dike against those invading waters of novel opinion social, political, and otherwise.” Vere is not one given easily to fits of discomfiture or moral dilemma. He believes strongly in the right of his nation and military, and disciplines himself and his men accordingly. Yet, for the first time we are aware of, Vere becomes torn between his father-like love for Billy and his son-like love for his country.
Jonathan Edwards creates a more effective argument for the intended audience in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” than “The Speech in the Virginia Convention” written by Patrick Henry, by utilizing various techniques. Patrick Henry makes a strong argument however in the end, Edwards’ sermon grows to be more effective. Edwards creates the argument by strengthening the writing through tone, structure, fallacies and knowledge of the congregation that became his audience. Henry’s piece uses methods of oratory persuasion but the actual topic of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” has an advantage from the start by appealing to fear, a fallacy of logic. Even with the strong basis “The Speech in the Virginia Convention” by Patrick Henry, Edwards’ “Sinners in the hands of an Angry God” proves the more effective piece in the end.
As he immerses his audience into combat with the soldiers, Shaara demonstrates the more emotional aspects of war by highlighting the personal lives of the men fighting. For example, when Shaara reveals the pasts of James Longstreet and Lewis Armistead’s, I started to picture them as the men that they were and not as soldiers out for blood. After suffering a devastating loss of three of his children to fever, Longstreet is tossed into battle. In Armistead’s case, he not only suffered the loss of his wife, but also of a friend fighting on the Union side, General Winfield Scott Hancock. Shaara saves his readers a front row seat to the inner turmoil of General Chamberlain regarding his hindering duty as a soldier clashes with his duty to family as he strived to serve the Union as well as protec...
Jünger’s opening chapter recalls the enthusiastic first thoughts on entering the war, upon arrival in Champagne, “Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war .” Though the illusion was soon dispelled, throughout the novel Jünger did not seem to be phased by the reality of his mission. When Jünger described reaching Orainville, he wrote, “We saw only a few, ragged, shy civilians; everywhere eels soldiers in worn tattered tunics, with faces weather-beaten and often with a heavy growth of beard, strolling along at a slow pace, or standing in little clusters in doorways, watching our arrival with ribald remarks .” This is Jünger’s first of a pattern of acc...
In The Red Badge of Courage, Henry Fleming was drawn to enlist by his boyhood dreams. His highly romanticized notion of war was eclectic, borrowing from various classical and medieval sources. Nevertheless, his exalted, almost deified, conception of the life of a soldier at rest and in combat began to deflate before the even the ink had dried on his enlistment signature. Soon the army ceased to possess any personal characteristics Henry had once envisioned, becoming an unthinking, dispas...
Robert Ross’ is introduced to characters with varying outlooks on the world, based on their own social and economic backgrounds. The soldiers around Robert Ross differ greatly,...
The Canadian Corps had just been given a new lease on life, whether they knew it or not. Canadian Major-General Arthur Currie and Lt.-General Sir Julian Byng and the entire Corps had been tasked with an impossible task in some opinions. Tasked they were with ...
...eing killed by the land owner. Although his father dies, Sarty’s decision frees him from terror but not grief and despair. Sarty rationalizes the death and evil of his father by thinking, “He was brave!... He was in the war!. . .He was in Colonel Sartoris cavalry” (349). The young Sarty did not know his father was a mercenary soldier and fought only for money, not honor.
There is no end to the ambiguity in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”; this essay hopes to explore this problem within the tale.
John Keegan, the author of “The Face of Battle” is allowing the reader to view different perspective of history, from the eyes of the soldier. Although by his own account, Keegan acknowledges, “I have never been in a battle. And I grow increasingly convinced that I have very little idea of what a battle can be like.” Keegan scorns historians for pointing the finger of failure after an evolution occurs and not examining the soldier’s point of view while the battle is transpiring.
What prompts Sarty to betray his own moral character is his fear of Abner, who he describes as the “black, flat, and bloodless . . . voice harsh like tin and without heat like tin”(279). Time and again, Sarty has witnesse...
Through Baümer, Remarque examines how war makes man inhuman. He uses excellent words and phrases to describe crucial details to this theme. "The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts," (page #). Baümer and his classmates who enlisted into the army see the true reality of the war. They enter the war fresh from school, knowing nothing except the environment of hopeful youth and they come to a premature maturity with the war, their only home. "We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. We are not youth any longer" (page #). They have lost their innocence. Everything they are taught, the world of work, duty, culture, and progress, are not the slightest use to them because the only thing they need to know is how to survive. They need to know how to escape the shells as well as the emotional and psychological torment of the war.
Though the book is a novel, it gives the reader insights into the realities of war. In this genre, the author is free to develop the characters in a way that brings the reader into the life of Paul Baumer and his comrades. The novel frees the author from recounting only cold, sterile facts. This approach allows the reader to experience what might have been irrelevant facts if presented in a textbook. This book is written from a perspective foreign to most Americans.
Horner states " throughout gender history, men have been pressured to react to deadly crisis according to the sacred rules of a male honor code. From Odysseus to King Arthur, from Ulysses to George Washington and from Aeneas to Norman Schwarzkopf, clearly the most widely accepted values of integrity, dignity, respect, self respect, valor and thus unquestioned masculinity hinge upon a commissioned response to fear and duty." (Horner, 1999) Tim Obrien shows that the classic battle of good versus evil. Lieutenant Cross's desires of Martha created an illusion that caused him to focus on himself, instead of his troops. The central tension comes between his imaginary love affair and the real responsibilities he has as the officer in command. He bypassed all his responsibilities, for his
He envisions the town, people in his future, and people in his past. The pressure of the universe is too overwhelming for him: "Even in my imagination, the shore just twenty yards away, I couldn't make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that's all it was. And right then I submitted" (57). O'Brien's embarrassment of being classified as a traitor engulfs him. His fear of cowardice forces him to submit; it forces him to go to war. Sitting on the shore with all of his loved ones staring at him, even though they are fictitious, shatters him, causing him to surrender to a futile cause.
When his father first appears on the scene, the Bayard says: “He was not big, it was just the things he did… that made him seem big to us” (9). Swept up in the romance of war, with the dust of battle clinging to him, John Sartoris seems to assume a larger than life persona but even as the narrator delineates his father before us, he attaches a caveat that in actuality, the Colonel was different from how he saw him as a young boy. This statement presages the mature understanding of his father’s character that Bayard develops as the novel progresses. In “The Odor of Verbena”, he has reached such clarity of vision that he can say without much difficulty that his father was a difficult man to get along with, he ac...