Imagery And Irony In Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds

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Recommended: Positive and negative effects of war

For a long time, people have been drawn to stories and the subject of war, some authors write these stories or poems to memorialize battles, honor the people who have fought, or to glorify war. However also some writers do it to protest against war, they will use three different things imagery, irony, and structure. The reason for imagery is to make people either see the images in their own minds, with the writer's words giving the reader pictures and sensations like they were there. They also use irony to make the light shine on the bad things by making them sound good, even though nothing about war is good. The last one is structure, they use this to organize their writing, some writers make it jumbled around and some make it organized and …show more content…

This book is using fictional characters but it is based on a true story, he is imagining talking to his old high school friends. In this run on sentence it is going over his long jumbled thoughts. “... because there isn't any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed,/ or for that matter killing men and shooting/ them in the back and shooting/ them more times then necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill/ everything you saw sometimes…” A couple lines down “ What are you gonna do?, but really it doesn't matter.../ until only the animals made you sad, the husks of dogs filled with explosives and old arty shells” The thoughts that are running through his head are all mixed and depressing because he is mentally scarred from war and being in that situation. Another example is Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried published in 1990. It is organized and all makes sense, there is more than one run on sentence. He talks about the near necessities and the main necessities needed for war. “ Among the necessities and near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knife, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog/ tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes…” His are in lists and welly stated while Powers is all

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