Everyone has had some type of conflict in his or her life. Both “The Finish of Patsy Barnes” and “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh” describe important conflicts that the main characters Joby, the fourteen year old soldier and Patsy, the young African American boy are affectedly their conflicts and each must attempt to find a resolution. Both Joby and Patsy are young boys who have internal conflicts. Patsy, after moving to Dalesford, wanted to run away back to Kentucky. However, “After a few weeks he steeled himself with the heroic resolution to make the best of what he had.” When his mom became sick with pneumonia, he knew that he had to do something for her, but the problem was that they were “very poor- too poor” to call a doctor for her. …show more content…
He too had an internal conflict and it was that he was a runaway. Joby had run away to fight in the war, but he had come to recognize that he had fears of the upcoming battles. Battles of the unknown, about the enemy, how he was to protect himself and keep himself from dying. Joby only had a drum for he was the drummer boy. “Me, thought the boy, I got only a drum, two sticks to beat it, and no shield.” Joby cried with fear and he had to find a resolution on how to be in this battle and survive. The general then came to Joby and commented to Joby about it being all right to cry comforted him. The general told him about how he had also cried. The general went on to tell him, that many young men had died and were going to continue to die but he could not tell that to the young soldiers, for he feared that this would cause the soldiers to give up before even starting the battle. The soldiers would defeat themselves. “Sometime this week more innocents will get shot out of pure Cherokee enthusiasm than ever got shot before. Owl Creek was full of boys splashing around in the noonday sun just a few hours ago. I fear it will be full of boys again, just floating, at sundown tomorrow, not caring where the current takes them.” This was the symbolism of the young men dying. “You on the other hand have an idea about dying in the war, but they don’t,” the general told Joby, “you are the heart of the
Joby and Patsy were immensely different in their attitude at the beginning of the story. Pasty was a troublemaker with little fear while Joby was fearful of the war ahead of him. Near the end they were very similar. Both of them became more mature at the end. When Patsy rode the horse, Black Boy, that’s dam was the horse that killed Patsy’s father it took courage and he had to do it to save his mother's life. Joby was faced with the challenges of war. When the general
Ever since the snowball accident Dunny has been preoccupied by worrying over Mary Dempster, and now her son Paul. At the age of sixteen the small town of Deptford becomes too much for Dunny to handle so he decides to drop out of secondary school and join the Army. Dunny needed a change in his life, something to get his mind off Mrs. Dempster and the guilt he felt for her. Leading up to his departure to the War he never really saw much of Mary, mainly because Mr. Dempster told him to stay away, but also because every time him saw her he couldn't hold back feelings of guilt and remorse. This troubled Dunny, much more then he would ever let on. On the other hand, Boy was doing as well as ever, possibly due to the fact that he knew that much of the responsibility of Mary and Paul was securely on the shoulders of Dunny. Dunny knew this as well but it was too late to do much about it except leave.
about the war and his lack of place in his old society. The war becomes
Ransom is thirteen years old when he joins the army. Most of his friends had already joined and died. He decides to join to help protect the Union. Ransom’s parents were against this and warned him not to. The battlefront is not a safe place- much less for a boy of such small stature. Disobeying his parents, he runs away to go join the army and becomes and Private and Drummer in Company I of the Tenth West Virginia Volunteer Infantry. The Yankee soldiers soon find that even though he is very small, he has a lot of heart.
Conflict is opposition between two forces, and it may be external or internal,” (Barker). There are two styles of external conflict that can be examined within the plot of “Sonny’s Blues”. The first of these is character versus society. This is the outer layer of the external conflict observed between Sonny and the society, which his life is out casted from. The meat and potatoes of the external conflict however, is character versus character. Sonny lives a lifestyle that his brother seems to be incapable of understanding. The internal conflict lies within the narrator. It is his struggle to understand his brother that drives the plot. The climax occurs when Sonny and the narrator argue in the apartment. The argument stems from the narrators complete inability to understand Sonny’s drug usage and life as a musician, and Sonny’s feeling of abandonment and inability to make his brother understand him. This conflict appears to come to a resolve at the resolution as the narrator orders Sonny a drink following hearing Sonny perform for the first time. It appears as though this is the moment when the narrator begins to understand, perhaps for the first time, his brother the
to deteriorate the human spirit. Starting out leaving you're home and family and ready to fight for you country, to ending up tired and scarred both physically and mentally beyond description. At the beginning of the novel nationalist feelings are present through pride of Paul and the rest of the boys. However at the end of the war it is apparent how pointless war really is.
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.
For Finny and Gene, the summer session at Devon was a time of blissful happiness and a time where they allowed themselves to become utterly overtaken by their own illusions. The summer session was the complete embodiment of peace and freedom, and Gene saw Devon as a haven of peace. To them, the war was light years away and was almost like a dream than an actual event. At Devon, it was hard for them to imagine that war could even exist. Finny and Gene forged the Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session and acted out in the most wild and boisterous ways. Missing dinner or being absent from school for days to go to the beach did not even earn them a reprimand. “I think we reminded them of what peace was like, we boys of sixteen....We were careless and wild, and I suppose we could be thought of as a sign of the life the war was being fought to prese...
I strongly believe the boy was too young to go into the war. The Drummer Boy of Shiloh is about a fourteen year old boy who is to young to go into war. His role in the war was to beat the drum. this historical fiction written by Ray Braddford. The drummer boy of shiloh has many uses of symbolism such as drums and caps.
...s, demonstrated through the author's talent, are denouncing the authority figures who were supposed to guide his generation into adulthood but instead turned the youth against each other in the pursuit of superficial ideals. The soldiers were simply the victims of a meaningless war.
Chris and Finny have the same drive to try something that they had never done before and breakaway, much like other young adults and that is “why [it] has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war” (Krakauer 182). Finny, an adventurous, daring boy at Devon wants to be a participant in the World War, like the other boys his age, but is not able to due to his leg injury. In most countries, the average age of people in the army is 18-20, usually young adults. It has always been easy to have people involved in the wars because many young adults want to prove that they are old enough to be independent and free from their parents and society’s expectations. Finny wrote to the army and the navy to try to be a part of the war, because he will “hate it everywhere if [he is] not in this war” as a result of the daring and confident side that he and many other boys of that time had (Knowles 103). Finny and Chris McCandless wanted to leave the simple life that they were leading and live a life of adventure. Many adventurers would agree that living a life full of unknown and adventure is the most exciting life that anybody could live, and that is what Chris and Finny wanted to achieve. Finny and Chris want to escape the horrid life that they lead and
James Baldwin, author of Sonny’s Blues, was born in Harlem, NY in 1924. During his career as an essayist, he published many novels and short stories. Growing up as an African American, and being “the grandson of a slave” (82) was difficult. On a day to day basis, it was a constant battle with racial discrimination, drugs, and family relationships. One of Baldwin’s literature pieces was Sonny’s Blues in which he describes a specific event that had a great impact on his relationship with his brother, Sonny. Having to deal with the life-style of poverty, his relationship with his brother becomes affected and rivalry develops. Conclusively, brotherly love is the theme of the story. Despite the narrator’s and his brother’s differences, this theme is revealed throughout the characters’ thoughts, feelings, actions, and dialogue. Therefore, the change in the narrator throughout the text is significant in understanding the theme of the story. It is prevalent to withhold the single most important aspect of the narrator’s life: protecting his brother.
O’Brien evokes an appeal to emotions throughout the excerpt to convey his condemnation for how the war eternally scarred those involved. O’Brien intended to manipulate an emotional response by stating that the war was “a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect.” The reader could gather that the war was lonely, and O’Brien implied that to further reflect his disdainful attitude toward the war. For these soldiers to constantly feel alone, it is easy to sympathize with their situation. As O’Brien emphasized the solitude and “endless march” on the solders, his discontent with the war increases. His emotional appeal was appropriately scattered
After he goes to ride the soldier, he his flung from his back and actually sees the soldier, “a face that lack a lower jaw – from upper teeth to the throat was a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone.” (Bierce 44). This is the first glimpse the boy comprehends of the true devastation of war. And at this point the child has his first rational reaction,“terrified at last, ran to a tree near by, got upon the farther side of it and took a more serious view of the situation.” (Bierce 44). The author is using the childes revelation of the violence in war to introduce to his readers the devastation of
The next morning at about 5:00 AM, Patsy found a ransom note on the bottom of the staircase. The note described the kidnapping of JonBenet and demanded $180,000 or JonBenet would be killed. Patsy quickly went to JonBenet’s room and, just as the note had stated, she had been kidnapped. Patsy called her husband and they then contacted the police, who arrived quickly after being called.... ... middle of paper ...