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War's effect on literature
War and peace essay
War's effect on literature
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In the textbook, the War and Peace chapter is preluded by an epigraph from Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone which states: “Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.” O’Brien’s quote goes against the stereotypical depiction of the “war hero.” O’Brien believes that just because someone participates in a war does not mean that the person is able to make sense of war. As O’Brien believes, and as numerous other authors throughout the War and Peace Unit believe, war is confusing and meaningless, especially in regard to the vast …show more content…
However, at this time, the speaker was merely a newborn baby. This does not hinder the speaker’s ability to relate ideas and communicate though as the speaker authenticates her newborn self by claiming all babies are born with a sense of omniscience that they eventually lose. By telling the story through the perspective of an infant, the speaker incorporates a childish tone with war which is obviously not supposed to be childish. For example, the speaker relays, “In France the conscripted soldiers leapfrogged over the dead on the advance and littered the fields with limbs and hands, or drowned in the mud.” Through her description of soldiers “leapfrogging” over other dead soldiers, Spark characterizes the death and destruction of war as senseless. Also, by telling the story from the infant’s perspective, Spark juxtaposes the actions typical to a baby with the calamity of war. The speaker says, “On all the world’s fighting fronts the men killed in action or dead of wounds numbered 8,538,315 and the warriors wounded and maimed were 21,219,452. With these figures in mind I sat up in my high chair and banged my spoon on the table.” This juxtaposition downplays the significance of the destructiveness of war and conveys that war makes as much sense as the random actions of newborn
..." the speaker is telling his audience that the dead soldier was a young man. The tenderness of his age further amplifies the horrific nature of war.
Vonnegut conveys throughout the novel, the message of war being fought by those too young who do not understand why they are fighting. From analysing the novel, we can see that he is emotionally unstable and may suffer from schizophrenia as the book is structure episodically. It can also be seen in the motif of "so it goes" being said after an explanation of a violent or theme of death scene form his life. The effect of this motif and repetition is to display how he is emotionally lacks empathy and is disconnected from these scenes. This is a result of his brain injury and experiences from war, that still impact and have changed him since coming back from the war. This is evident in "And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs." page 12, chapter 1 said by Mary O'Hare. The simile of the motif of babies displays how we send our children to crusade and fight for what is unknown to them when they are at the end of their happiest and innocence time of their life, which is then traumatised and destroyed by going to war. Vonnegut is posing the question whether it is sane to send our babies to the war to fight for a cause that they don't even know?, even though we know it will damage and change who they are once they step onto the
Many times readers lose interest in stories that they feel are not authentic. In addition, readers feel that fictitious novels and stories are for children and lack depth. Tim O’ Brien maintains that keeping readers of fiction entertained is a most daunting task, “The problem with unsuccessful stories is usually simple: they are boring, a consequence of the failure of imagination- to vividly imagine and to vividly render extraordinary human events, or sequences of events, is the hard-lifting, heavy-duty, day-by-day, unending labor of a fiction writer” (Tim O’ Brien 623). Tim O’ Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” examines the correlation between the real experiences of war and the art of storytelling. In O’Brien’s attempt to bridge the gap between fiction and non-fiction the narrator of the story uses language and acts of violence that may be offensive to some. However some readers agree that Tim O" Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story" would lack authenticity and power without the use of crude language and violence.
The novel All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, the poem, “In Flanders Field,” by John McCrae and the film, Gallipoli, Demonstrates how war makes men feel unimportant and, forces soldiers to make hard decisions that no one should half to make. In war people were forced to fight for their lives. Men were forced to kill one another to get their opinion across to the opposing sides. When men went home to their families they were too scared to say what had happened to them in the war. Many people had a glorified thought about how war is, Soldiers didn't tell them what had truly happened to them.
A true war story blurs the line between fact and fiction, where it is neither true nor false at the same time. What is true and what is not depends on how much you believe it to be. In the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story” from the novel “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, the author provides various definitions to how the validity of a war story can be judged. The entire chapter is a collection of definitions that describe the various truths to what a true war story is. Unlike O’Brien, who is a novelist and storyteller, David Finkel, the author of “The Good Soldiers”, is a journalist whose job is to report the facts. Yet in the selection that we read, chapter nine, Finkel uses the convention of storytelling, which relies heavily on the stories the combat troops tell each other or him personally. Finkel attempts to give an unbiased view of the Iraq war through the stories of the soldiers but in doing so, Finkel forfeits the use of his own experiences and his own opinions. From O’Brien’s views on what a true war story is combined with my own definitions, I believe that Finkel provides a certain truth to his war stories but not the entire truth.
Most stories about war show the glory of war and heroism of soldiers. According to OED, war is “a state of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within a nation or state”. But, what’s the definition about the stage of confusions in the soldier’s mind? A conflict between two nations or states can be resolved in a particular amount of time but can an experience from a person’s mind can ever be forgotten, can a person ever be able to resolve his own conflict: his fight with his emotions, changes, and his own mind? Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a powerful combination of fact and fiction; through description and imagination, O’Brien allows the reader to feel a soldier's hardships in the war and emotional state. His purpose of the book is to tell a war story, which isn’t true, doesn’t have a teaching, cannot be believed, and most of all, which never has an ending & not about the Vietnam War. In his fiction, each man’s physical burden reflects on to his emotional burden caused by different changes in his life throughout the war time. In The Things They Carried, O’Brien wants to convey the emotional experience of soldiers without concern for objective reality.
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain ...
Inevitably, there comes a point in everybody’s life at which they have an experience that completely alters their view of the world. This moment is when one loses his or her innocence, or comes of age, and he or she realizes that they do not live in a utopian Golden Age. Parents are charged with the monumental duty of protecting their children’s innocence, but everybody inescapably grows up. This experience can be anything from an embarrassing situation at school to coming within seconds of death. In the short story “Ambush” by Tim O’Brien, the author tells the true story of his daughter confronting him and asked him if he had ever killed anyone. In an effort to be a good parent and protect the nine-year-old’s innocence, the author does not share with her the story he goes on to tell to the reader. He explains how many years ago, he was serving in the army and was taking a shift guarding his troop’s campsite when all of a sudden, a young man from the opposing army came walking up the trail. Without a second thought, O’Brien killed the boy with a grenade, and he lost his innocence after realizing he had killed a defenseless man without hesitation. Tim O’Brien develops Ambush as a coming of age story through the use of literary devices.
He states, "The myth of war is essential to justify the horrible sacrifices required in war, the destruction and death of innocents. It can be formed only by denying the reality of war, by turning the lies, the manipulation, the inhumanness of war into the heroic ideal" (26). Chris Hedges tries to get the point across that in war nothing is as it seems.... ... middle of paper ...
Many of the stories are based around the mentality of war. How in society's perception, war is a chance for men to be brave a make themselves into the most noble of heroes, where in reality men are simply thrown into a situation where their main priority is to save themselves. Like in this “Situation”, a man sees a grenade thrown near his platoon, so the brave soldier in an act of sacrifice jumps on it. This of course would absorb the explosion saving his comrades, wrong. The grenade was an anti vehicular charge that not only kills the man, but kills all the men in front, behind and to the side. That's war, it’s not brave, it’s not beautiful, it's just a world of shit. A world where boys are grabbed and told to fight, to protect their country in a jungle an ocean away. War’s
When O'Brien says that a true war story is not about war he means that a war story is not about death, fighting or war, it is about the soldiers grim experiences. O’Brien writes “A true war story in never about war… It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow” (62). The quote demonstrates that O'Brien's definition of a war story does not describe what happens but it describes the feelings and emotions that were felt because of what happened. A true war story does not focus on what happened but it should focus on the pain that the soldiers felt.
This is about the bullets that puncture the air and the image of ‘smacking’ refers to the winded feelings the solider has as he runs for his life across the field. His ‘numb’ rifle and ‘smashed arm’ have a the same meaning: he could feel numb to the pain he has to cause with the rifle. He could have smashed his rifle into his arm in his panic. This highlights both the soldier’s inexperience and trauma at what he has had to do in the war. This poem highlights the reality of conflicts and the fear and terror that soldiers feel.
Tim O'Brien is confused about the Vietnam War. He is getting drafted into it, but is also protesting it. He gets to boot camp and finds it very difficult to know that he is going off to a country far away from home and fighting a war that he didn't believe was morally right. Before O'Brien gets to Vietnam he visits a military Chaplin about his problem with the war. "O'Brien I am really surprised to hear this. You're a good kid but you are betraying you country when you say these things"(60). This says a lot about O'Brien's views on the Vietnam War. In the reading of the book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Tim O'Brien explains his struggles in boot camp and when he is a foot soldier in Vietnam.
In times of war, many men and women tend to forget or alter their memories. Thoughts became mixed up, the sense of time becomes delayed, and the telling of one man’s experience does not seem possibly true. In The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien writes about realistic events that never truly happened to him while he was at war. Nevertheless, he goes on telling about in writing a war story, a person can never remember the full event or will change it in a way that is not true. War will bring the worst out in people, and often, many of the men and women who live through it, cannot tell the full tale.
The revulsions of war; the atrocity, the gore and the ghastly smoke resulting from the guns ricocheting off the towering masses of apocalyptic tanks, as well as the aftermath; the melancholy, the pain and the tears is something that I will only experience in my deepest, darkest nightmares. But as a young girl growing up in Dulwich Hill, my only impression of war is an annoyed one. The low grumbles of the decrepit veterans complaining about their time and those annoying one minute silences in school that gave me one minute to listen to the loud breathing of the person next to me. I doubt my impression will change when I move to Vietnam. “Just more oldies to deal with,” I scoffed to myself as I placed a heavy box into my mother’s car.