War: American Criticism and Commentary
The three sources being analyzed are Stephen Crane's poem “War is Kind”, Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and Joseph Heller's novel Catch- 22. Each source covers a chapter in American War history: The Civil War, The Cold War, and World War II, respectively. Though the wars on which the works are based occurred over a period of over one-hundred years, all three sources share a similar theme. That is, war is anything but heroic and noble, but rather, it is a convoluted, tragic, and crooked state of affairs that results in the death of many. Though this theme unifies all three works, the authors and director convey their messages uniquely. In his heartfelt and tragic poem, “War is Kind”, Stephen Crane writes about the sadness that comes with the death of individual soldiers during battle, and uses sarcasm to convey his message. On the other hand, Heller and Kubrick deliver an equally powerful message about the absurdities of war through use of dark humour and satire, though Kubrick's film focuses much more on comedic value as opposed to Heller's more bitter and realistic novel.
Written by Stephen Crane in 1899, “War is Kind” is a heartfelt and tragic poem that embodies Crane's bitter and austere view on war. In addition to Crane's use of rhetorical devices such as imagery and emotion-evoking syntax to describe the horrid battle field and the pain the bereaved individuals feel, the poem's sarcastic tone is ultimately established through Crane's use of irony. Though the poem is written in free verse, Crane meticulously arranges his verses and stanzas so that descriptive sentences about the tragedy of war are followed by the recurring ph...
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In addition to the topic of absurdity, Heller also makes statements regarding the jarring realities of war, as Stephen Crane has in “War is Kind”. Though the novel's primary focus is satire, as the story progresses and many of Yossarian's friends die tragic and often grotesque ways, Heller makes no attempt at mitigating the severity of their deaths as he describes in full detail the episodes in which they are killed. Yossarian is even asked by doctors to pretend to be the deceased son of a family who has come to visit: “All you've got to do is lie there a few minutes and die a little. Is that asking so much?”(183). Despite the playful manner that surrounds much of the story, by including these jarring moments of death and displaying it as simply a part of everyday life, Heller is reaffirming the fact that war is no joking matter.
War is seen as a universal concept that often causes discomfort and conflict in relation to civilians. As they are a worrying universal event that has occurred for many decades now, they posed questions to society about human's nature and civilization. Questions such as is humanity sane or insane? and do humans have an obsession with destruction vs creation. These questions are posed from the two anti-war texts; Dr Strangelove by Stanley Kubrick and Slaughterhouse Five written by Kurt Vonnegut.
There are many reasons that the human race goes to war against each other. In the essay The Ecstasy of War (1997) by Barbara Ehrenreich, she states that one reason that war is started between men is people want to expand, to move further in life and the man-kind are trained to be ready for war.
...display how the average citizen would see war for the first time. Colonel Kelly sees her as “vacant and almost idiotic. She had taken refuge in deaf, blind, unfeeling shock” (Vonnegut 100). To a citizen who even understands the war process, war is still heinous and dubiously justified when viewed first hand. The man who seems to have coldly just given away her son’s life without the same instinct as her has participated in this heinous wartime atrocity for so long, but it only affect her now because she cannot conceive of the reality of it until it is personally in front of her. That indicates a less complete political education of war even among those who war may have affected their entire lives. The closeness and the casualties of this “game” will affect her the most because she has to watch every move that previously could have been kept impartial and unviewed.
The poet Wilfred Owen was one of many poets who were against war. He reflected this idea of anti-war in his poems, one of his poems called “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, mirrors most aspects of war all put together in this short still deep poem. An example of that would be when the speaker stated,” What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”(1) The speaker asks is there any sound that marks our soldier’s death other than the sounds of church bell’s which are mostly rung to represent somebody’s absence? Clearly, the speaker sets anger as the tone of the poem through this question to show that soldier’s death is unremarkable.. The speaker compares the soldiers to a “cattle” which illustrates that soldiers are treated more like animals with no feelings and also shows how they are killed indiscriminately in war. Finally the line ironically contains an iambic pentameter which is a natural rhythm for such dark, grim, dull subject. The two novels, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, and All Quiet on The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, both present a similar idea of how soldiers are killed out there in the front comprehensively and the dehumanization of war towards its soldiers. The first novel is set during the Civil War, and it focuses on the psychological aspects of one soldier named Henry Fleming and how his naive thoughts about war constantly change through the course of the novel. The second novel presents the life of a soldier named Paul Baumer and his friends who were faced with the terribleness of war and how severely it affected their lives. The Red badge of Courage and All Quiet on The Western Front are similar in the way of how the main characters develop through the novel to change from naïve and innocent men ...
War novels often depict a war hero facing off against an enemy, with a winner on the other side. However, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five takes an opposite approach to the telling of a war story. The narrator uses the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, to display his own anti-war sentiment. Vonnegut’s style of writing as well as his characters help to portray the effect of war on individuals and society as a whole.
Known today as two of the most prominent American satirists, Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut both served time as soldiers during World War II, Heller serving as a bombardier in Italy (Scoggins) and Vonnegut as a soldier and prisoner of war in Germany (Parr). Not coincidentally, both Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22 and Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death follow the journeys of young men in combat during the Second World War – Captain John Yossarian of the US Army Air Forces and soldier Billy Pilgrim, respectively. While it is evident that these fictional novels are both set during the World War II era and convey bleak images of war, closer inspection of both texts brings to light the common
Tim O’Brien states in his novel The Things They Carried, “The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat” (77). This profound statement captures not only his perspective of war from his experience in Vietnam but a collective truth about war across the ages. It is not called the art of combat without reason: this truth transcends time and can be found in the art produced and poetry written during the years of World War I. George Trakl creates beautiful images of the war in his poem “Grodek” but juxtaposes them with the harsh realities of war. Paul Nash, a World War I artist, invokes similar images in his paintings We are Making a New World and The Ypres Salient at Night. Guilaume Apollinaire’s writes about the beautiful atrocity that is war in his poem “Gala.”
History has caused us, as the human race, to subconsciously assume that War is seen to be a product of death, destruction and hatred, a need to seek revenge on those who started the war. That, throughout time, war has been considered meaningful. Is War meaningful or is it better to be seen as meaningless? Were the three most well-known wars of history, World War 1, World War 2 and the Vietnam War, products of a meaningful event that inevitably killed thousands? Or do we need to realise that the only thing meaningful in regards to War, is the literature written by authors or poets who have experienced War and its devastating effects. That authors like Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote his literary classic “Slaughter House Five” in order to make people realise the true meaning behind war. That all war conveys is an attitude of selfishness and arrogance, a product of slavery and victimisation. This is also evident in not just “Slaughter House Five”, but in Joseph Heller’s novel, “Catch 22”. Both these two novels show different but similar viewpoints of war, by emphasising the concerns and ideas of the time periods in which these two novels were written. Today, you are joined with me, Sarah Day, here at the Brisbane
In conclusion, the author’s use internal conflict, mood shifts, and imagery to convey how dehumanizing effects of war can change a person, also one’s relationship with loved ones. The author’s use of mood shift in the story foreshadows that the sniper will hurt or even kill relations with someone, but this comes to be known that it will come back to heart him more than it did the other person. As at the start is war foul and cruel as we thought or is it uses as humans that make war such evil things.
Joseph Heller uses a blend of dark humor, blatant irony, and dialogue that disassembles the common perspective of war. Through his charming and quirky ensemble of characters, he explores many themes of somber reality, in the end, impacting readers in a way that they do not even realize. Catch-22 delves deeply into the truths of the war with a mixture of literary techniques, though through them, Heller delivers a masterful story that is hilarious, captivating, and serious, all at
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, written by the talented author Chris Hedges, gives us provoking thoughts that are somewhat painful to read but at the same time are quite personal confessions. Chris Hedges, a talented journalist to say the least, brings nearly 15 years of being a foreign correspondent to this book and subjectively concludes how all of his world experiences tie together. Throughout his book, he unifies themes present in all wars he experienced first hand. The most important themes I was able to draw from this book were, war skews reality, dominates culture, seduces society with its heroic attributes, distorts memory, and supports a cause, and allures us by a constant battle between death and love.
... 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.
War and its ramifications for those who are unfortunately entangled in it, is an issue that has fueled both political discussion and literary exploration throughout the previous century. Underived, authentic accounts of the experience and effects of war, from those who have served in it, can be especially enlightening for the majority of society who have had the fortune of not being intimately familiar with war. Through the examination of poems and stories written by soldiers, who were inspired by their involvement in conflict, one can obtain a greater understanding of this gruesome aspect of life, without having to directly experience it. Similarly, soldier turned poet, Bruce Weigl, has contributed his perspective on war through his literary
Like "The Lives of the Dead," it begins with a statement that the rest of the chapter throws into question. "The War wasn 't all terror and violence," the narrator tells us, "Sometimes things could almost get sweet" (31). What follows, however, is a series of vignettes that are anything but "sweet." When a Vietnamese boy with a plastic leg approaches an American soldier with a chocolate bar, the soldier reflects, "One leg, for Chrissake. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo" (31). When the same soldier steals his friend 's puppy, "strapped it to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and squeezed the firing device," he responds with an ironic affirmation of the initiation right of the conventional war story: "What 's everyone so upset about? ... I mean, Christ, I 'm just a boy" (37). Here, the novel renders ironic both the loss of innocence and the "reconsideration" that structure the traditional war story. The positive spin that underlies the war story as a genre emerges here only as a bankrupt fantasy. Thus in "How to Tell a True War Story," the narrator warns, "If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie" (68). Aimed
Earnest Hemmingway once said "Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime." (Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference) War is a gruesome and tragic thing and affects people differently. Both Vonnegut and Hemmingway discus this idea in their novels A Farewell to Arms and Slaughterhouse Five. Both of the novels deal not only with war stories but other genres, be it a science fiction story in Vonnegut’s case or a love story in Hemingway’s. Despite all the similarities there are also very big differences in the depiction of war and the way the two characters cope with their shocking and different experiences. It is the way someone deals with these tragedies that is the true story. This essay will evaluate how the main characters in both novels deal with their experiences in different ways.