Loss of identity, loyalty, determination, maturity, survival, death. Empire of the sun is a book written by J.G ballard that is slow paced and its plot distilled to convey out the most potent moments of Ballard’s childhood. The ideas manifested in Ballard’s story teaches us that friendship can often have a greater significance than the matter of our own well-being. As readers, we can relate to the story at a personal level because we live in a society today where our eyes and focus is devoted to the screens of our mobile phones and selfishness dominates our lives and our perspective towards others and our relationship with each other. In Ballard’s book, we see that Jim’s desire for love and human relationship is expressed through kindness …show more content…
At the start of the war, Jim is too young to comprehend what is happening. However, as his mind and body grows, he began to plan his future and envision himself to be one of the japanese fighters, eventually forgetting his parents. ‘Reminding Jim that he had once been a child as Jim had been before the war’ suggests that Jim considers himself as a man and a self dependant person. This book shows well the resilience and the determination of a young child to survive and find his parents that he will be able to see again after years of trying. Jim is not a lucky man, his patience and effort made who he was after the war; his dedication to his mission eventually brought him his victorious outcome. He is a person I would like my friends and the generation that only strives after profit to be introduced to. Ballard’s writing that told us about Jim made the book …show more content…
They had once ‘supplied Jim’s only protection in shanghai’ and he had once befriended a japanese soldier called kimura who Jim grieves upon his death. To Jim's eyes, the japanese must consist of friends and allies. His determination to find his parents have dwindled, and Jim thinks that he himself is Japanese. Jim saw his ‘official’ enemies as allies and friends when the japanese probably saw him as anything but. Hungry Jim looked to the eyes of the japanese and got food, lonely Jim looked up to the eyes of the japanese and found a friend, frightened Jim looked up to the eyes of the japanese and found safety. Young Jim looked to the eyes of the soldiers and found comfort he once found within his lost father. Jim only had the Japanese as a role model, his hero. Ballard’s book and the character he expresses, his own reflection, shows us well that the environment that we place ourselves affects our worldview and how we see ourselves and others around
“Tomorrow When The War Began” is a novel written by the author John Marsden which includes valuable lessons of resilience when hardships arise and courage over fear to save other lives. Two characters that portray these themes are Ellie and Robyn. Ellie overcomes the hardship of killing young soldiers and Robyn overcomes fear in order to save other lives, by putting her life at risk. John Marsden’s story emphasizes the life lessons which Ellie and Robyn have to experience to save their hometown of Wirrawee.
Nothing in life is permanent, everything one day will have to change. A basic necessity of life, change is the fuel that keeps our society moving. In the novel Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes, Johnny Tremain, a fourteen-year-old boy gifted in craftsmanship, experiences changes in all aspects of his life. From a crippled hand to fighting against the British for his country's independence, war transforms Johnny Tremain from a selfish child into a patriotic hero. As the war relentlessly continues, Johnny learns the effects that it has on him as he must focus on the real issue rather than centering around his individual concerns. By reading this novel, we can learn from Johnny how in times of conflict, young men like him must mature into men who
Okihiro, Gary Y. Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996.
...it may help us arrive at an understanding of the war situation through the eyes of what were those of an innocent child. It is almost unique in the sense that this was perhaps the first time that a child soldier has been able to directly give literary voice to one of the most distressing phenomena of the late 20th century: the rise of the child-killer. While the book does give a glimpse of the war situation, the story should be taken with a grain of salt.
During World War II, countless Japanese Canadians, and Americans, were relocated to internment camps out of fear of where their loyalties would lie. Because of this, those people were stricken from their homes and had their lives altered forever. Joy Kogawa’s Obasan highlights this traumatic event. In this excerpt, Kogawa uses shifts in point of view and style to depict her complex attitude and perception of the past.
John Dower's War without Mercy describes the ugly racial issues, on both the Western Allies and Japanese sides of the conflict in the Pacific Theater as well as all of Asia before during and after World War II and the consequences of these issues on both military and reconstruction policy in the Pacific. In the United States as well as Great Britain, Dower dose a good job of proving that, "the Japanese were more hated than the Germans before as well as after Pearl Harbor." (8) On this issue, there was no dispute among contemporary observers including the respected scholars and writers as well as the media. During World War II the Japanese are perceived as a race apart, a species apart referred to as apes, but at the same time superhuman. "There was no Japanese counterpart to the "good German" in the popular consciousness of the Western Allies." (8) Dower is not trying to prove how horrible the Japanese are. Instead, he is examining the both sides as he points out, "atrocious behavior occurred on all sides in the Pacific War." (12-13) Dower explores the propaganda of the United States and Japanese conflict to underline the "patterns of a race war," and the portability of racist stereotypes. Dower points out that "as the war years themselves changed over into an era of peace between Japan and the Allied powers, the shrill racial rhetoric of the early 1940s revealed itself to be surprisingly adaptable. Idioms that formerly had denoted the unbridgeable gap between oneself and the enemy proved capable of serving the goals of accommodation as well."(13) "the Japanese also fell back upon theories of "proper place" which has long been used to legitimize inequitable relationships within Japan itself."(9) After...
He arrives back at his town, unused to the total absence of shells. He wonders how the populations can live such civil lives when there are such horrors occurring at the front. Sitting in his room, he attempts to recapture his innocence of youth preceding the war. But he is now of a lost generation, he has been estranged from his previous life and war is now the only thing he can believe in. It has ruined him in an irreversible way and has displayed a side of life which causes a childhood to vanish alongside any ambitions subsequent to the war in a civil life. They entered the war as mere children, yet they rapidly become adults. The only ideas as an adult they know are those of war. They have not experienced adulthood before so they cannot imagine what it will be lie when they return. His incompatibility is shown immediately after he arrives at the station of his home town. ”On the platform I look round; I know no one among all the people hurrying to and fro. A red-cross sister offers me something to drink. I turn away, she smiles at me too foolishly, so obsessed with her own importance: "Just look, I am giving a soldier coffee!"—She calls me "Comrade," but I will have none of it.” He is now aware of what she is
War always seems to have no end. A war between countries can cross the world, whether it is considered a world war or not. No one can be saved from the reaches of a violent war, not even those locked in a safe haven. War looms over all who recognize it. For some, knowing the war will be their future provides a reason for living, but for others the war represents the snatching of their lives without their consent. Every reaction to war in A Separate Peace is different, as in life. In the novel, about boys coming of age during World War II, John Knowles uses character development, negative diction, and setting to argue that war forever changes the way we see the world and forces us to mature rapidly.
The obstacles Ichiro faced in searching for his lost identity reveal a discrepancy of American values, such as freedom and equality, which are deeply rooted in a segregated society. Through the negativity of many of the Japanese-American veterans and the differences among Ichiro’s entire family, he has literally gone from having a duel-heritage to no identity at all. Since he has no desire to be Japanese and feels unworthy to be American, he sees himself as nothing. His hatred of himself not only hinders the possibilities before him, but it also paints a whole new picture of America. Instead of a nation that is united and fights for freedom and equality, America is divided by racism and strips away the freedom of those they find inferior.
In the short story “Chickamauga”, the author Ambrose Bierce uses a young boy to connect to his audience with what is the disillusions of war, then leads them into the actuality and brutalities of war. Bierce uses a six year old boy as his instrument to relate to his readers the spirits of men going into combat, then transferring them into the actual terrors of war.
When the war breaks out, this tranquil little town seems like the last place on earth that could produce a team of vicious, violent soldiers. Soon we see Jim thrown into a completely contrasting `world', full of violence and fighting, and the strong dissimilarity between his hometown and this new war-stricken country is emphasised. The fact that the original setting is so diversely opposite to that if the war setting, the harsh reality of the horror of war is demonstrated.
In Hemingway’s short story “Soldier’s Home”, Hemingway introduces us to a young American soldier, that had just arrived home from World War I. Harold Krebs, our main character, did not receive a warm welcome after his arrival, due to coming home a few years later than most soldiers. After arriving home, it becomes clear that World War I has deeply impacted the young man, Krebs is not the same man that headed off to the war. The war had stripped the young man of his coping mechanism, female companionship, and the ability to achieve the typical American life.
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.
While soldiers are often perceived as glorious heroes in romantic literature, this is not always true as the trauma of fighting in war has many detrimental side effects. In Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front, the story of a young German soldier is told as he adapts to the harsh life of a World War I soldier. Fighting along the Western Front, nineteen year old Paul Baumer and his comrades begin to experience some of the hardest things that war has to offer. Paul’s old self gradually begins to deteriorate as he is awakened to the harsh reality of World War 1, depriving him from his childhood, numbing all normal human emotions and distancing the future, reducing the quality of his life. At the age of nineteen, Paul naively enlists in World War 1, blind to the fact he has now taken away his own childhood.
In War In war, they told him, “The heroes outnumber the soldiers ten to one.” Sasuke wondered what they meant at that time. Being a little raven haired boy of 10, rugged in jean overalls, hair long and tangled; his bare feet plunged onto the earth below him he hadn’t a care in the world. He looked onto his father, situated on the porch silently reading the morning news, leaving an unfinished dream catcher by the side of his chair. The neighborhood, asleep, but awake, was his sanctuary to meditate on these words his father has always told him from the day he was born. The words meant nothing to him, just an admission of his future attendance of war, a dreaded but lifelong dream. It meant nothing that his life has only barely begun. He was young, young and untried and he hated it. Friendless, spineless, and useless, for he couldn’t attend school, he was itching for a purpose in life. His father, a war vet, was as useless as he was, crippled from saving his brother from an enemy attack. His bravery in WWI left him a fool for his admirable quality was not taken into account. Someday he would be a hero, a warrior, and have friends that did not leave him out of playful activities and a family that would admire him, love him. He was not going to be like his father, a man his mother didn’t love, but kept for when the loneliness got too sad to bare with only her son by her side. Maybe one day he would finally become a man that would be accepted into a world that he hardly knows, but will one day smile back at him. Picking up the half-finished nightmare snatcher, he set to work making use of his little firm hands while they were still innocent. -- In war, they tell him, “The heroes outnumber the soldiers ten to one.” He saw it. He saw throu...