Bullets flying through the air right over me, my knees are shaking, and my feet are numb. I see familiar faces all around me dodging the explosives illuminating the air like lightning. Unfortunately, numerous familiar faces seem to disappear into the trenches. I try to run from the noise, but my mind keeps causing me to re-illustrate the painful memories left behind.
The three narratives “Home Soil” by Irene Zabytko, “Song of Napalm” by Bruce Weigl, and “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen all have the same feelings of war and memory, although not everyone experiences the same war. Zabytko, Weigl, and Owen used shifting beats, dramatic descriptions, and intense, painful images, to convince us that the horror of war far outweighs the devoted awareness of those who fantasize war and the memories that support it.
In the story “Home Soil” by Irene Zabytko, the reader is enlightened about a boy who was mentally and emotionally drained from the horrifying experiences of war. The father in the story knows exactly what the boy is going through, but he cannot help him, because everyone encounters his or her own recollection of war. “When their faces are contorted from sucking the cigarette, there is an unmistakable shadow of vulnerability and fear of living. That gesture and stance are more eloquent than the blood and guts war stories men spew over their beers” (Zabytko 492). The father, as a young man, was forced to reenact some of the same obligations, yet the father has learne...
War is cruel. The Vietnam War, which lasted for 21 years from 1954 to 1975, was a horrific and tragic event in human history. The Second World War was as frightening and tragic even though it lasted for only 6 years from 1939 to 1945 comparing with the longer-lasting war in Vietnam. During both wars, thousands of millions of soldiers and civilians had been killed. Especially during the Second World War, numerous innocent people were sent into concentration camps, or some places as internment camps for no specific reasons told. Some of these people came out sound after the war, but others were never heard of again. After both wars, people that were alive experienced not only the physical damages, but also the psychic trauma by seeing the deaths and injuries of family members, friends or even just strangers. In the short story “A Marker on the Side of the Boat” by Bao Ninh about the Vietnam War, and the documentary film Barbed Wire and Mandolins directed by Nicola Zavaglia with a background of the Second World War, they both explore and convey the trauma of war. However, the short story “A Marker on the Side of the Boat” is more effective in conveying the trauma of war than the film Barbed Wire and Mandolins because of its well-developed plot with well-illustrated details, and its ability to raise emotional responses from its readers.
After an event of large magnitude, it still began to take its toll on the protagonist as they often “carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die” during the war (O’Brien 1187). The travesties that occurred with the brutality of war did not subside and began to affect those involved in a deeply emotional way. The multitude of disastrous happenings influenced the narrator to develop a psychological handicap to death by being “afraid of dying” although being “even more afraid to show it” (O’Brien 1187). The burden caused by the war creates fear inside the protagonist’s mind, yet if he were to display his sense of distress it would cause a deeper fear for those around him, thus making the thought of exposing the fear even more frightening. The emotional battle taking place in the psyche of the narrator is directly repressed by the war.
...n amnesiac nation into “working through” its troubled past.” (Bly ,189) Story telling was the soldier’s salvation, their survival method. Being able to tell their stories let them express everything they were feeling and ultimately cope with the horrors of war and the guilt the carried.
These three works illustrate the representation of war from three types of people. First, there are the people who had no direct contact with the war themselves, though perhaps a loved one or a friend of theirs may have died, they were not directly involved. The attitudes of those characters that were not directly involved in the war are distinctly different from those who have returned from participating in the war. Those not directly involved in WWI paint a much less terrorizing representation of the war than those who fought in it. In the last group are those who died fighting in the war. The impressions that war left on this group of people are illustrated through the letters and poems that they wrote during their time in the war. These last two groups represent war in a similarly dark fashion.
In the poem titled “Song of Napalm” words capture the images of the horrific scenes the warfare presented. The emotion of someone suffering from PTSD is obvious through out the poem. This narrative poem uses end stopped and enjambmen...
Everyone encounters some type of battle or challenge in their lives. Some have to deal with something like passing a class, some with the stress of not knowing when their next meal will be. Some have to cope with the after-effects of the war. All war veterans have to bear the mental weight of the events that occurred while at war, feelings of fear and guilt, and sometimes the thoughts don’t seem to go away. We see this looking through the psychological lens in the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.
In the poems “Dulce et Decorum Est” written by Wilfred Owen and “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” written by Randall Jarrell, which both touch on the issues of war. In these two poems the Speaker uses imagery, diction, and sorrow to show how brutal the war was. They both convey the horror and futility of dying for a state. “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (Randall Jarrell 1945) and “Dulce et Decorum Est” (Wilfred Owen 1920) examine the impact war has on the soldiers who fight them.
While Wilfred Owen’s poems carry heavy meanings and truths around World War I, I believe that the ideas he is trying to show us are still valid in today’s world. We often hear on the news about American or British soldiers that have been killed fighting in the middle-east, but we hear of these stories almost every day, and I think it is fair to say most people have become fairly de-sensitized to these stories. Wilfred Owen has helped me to realise that this is unacceptable. As societies we do not take any blame for the lives lost at war, but I think that we should be standing up for these soldiers, and demanding that no more lives be lost. Our societies are not giving these modern soldiers the respect they deserve for risking their lives. It is through Owen’s techniques of tone, similes and metaphors that he has helped me to see this.
Intro: Many people are affected by war because of what happens and how they feel during war. The four texts I have studied which portray soldiers in a certain way are ‘Hero of War’ a song by Rise Against, ‘First Blood’ a movie by Ted Kotcheff, ‘Who’s for the game’ a poem by Jessie Pope and ‘Citizen Soldier’ a song by 3 doors down. The portrayal of soldiers is important because people perceive soldiers in different ways. The texts Citizen Soldier and Who’s for the game portray soldiers as being heroic and war in a positive way in comparison to Hero of War and First Blood which show the audience the negative impact on human lives that war can have.
It is estimated that there were 87,500,000 war, military and civilian, deaths in the last century. Writers Stephen Crane, Wilfred Owen, Tim O’Brien, and Kevin Powers have all participated in wars of the last hundred years, and they have written about their experiences in various ways. Wilfred Owen fought in World War I, Stephen Crane was a war reporter in Cuba, Tim O’Brien fought in the Vietnam War, and Kevin Powers fought in the War on Terror in Iraq. Even though these writers fought in different wars, they all have something in common; ………...These writers use imagery, irony, and structure to protest war.
Through Owen's recounting of his experiences as a soldier, he can detail the brutality of war and what it can do to ordinary humans. Owen's strong views on war has led to readers sympathising for soldiers and regrettably, shown the true nature of war as not something courageous, but atrocious. War should never have been as it can devolve normal humans into remorseless beings, not able to recover even after going home with loved
Another reason why war is a transformative event is because it gets rid of any misconceptions about warfare by showing individuals the reality of the situation. In the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen, the poet summarizes his experiences in war, and expresses his feelings about it. Throughout the poem, the reader can feel Owen’s hatred for the war by his use of many examples of negative imagery, and his feelings are most easily conveyed by the last lines, which read “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori”(Owen 27-28). Owen’s poem expresses his thoughts on how being quixotic, and not asking important questions as a soldier can have very dire consequences. The soldiers believed what they were told about war, which was that war is like a fairytale, and they never bothered asking any questions as to how their elders knew
	The pounding of shells, the mines, the death traps, the massive, blind destruction, the acrid stench of rotting flesh, the communal graves, the charred bodies, and the fear. These are the images of war. War has changed over the centuries from battles of legions of ironclad soldiers enveloped in glimmering armor fighting for what they believe to senseless acts of guerrilla warfare against those too coward to be draft-dodgers. Those who were there, who experienced the terror first hand were deeply effected and changed forever. In their retinas, images of blood and gore are burned for the rest of their life.
Have you ever witnessed something that has stuck with you forever? Unfortunately, over the years, our world has had deadly wars and millions of people have died for their country, leaving them with unbearable memories that have stuck with them throughout their lives. More times than not media outlets and the general public think it is a good thing to fight for one’s country, but do not ever learn the truth about what really happens during wars, even the Roman poet Horace said, “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” In “Dulce et Decorum Est” the author Wilfred Owen uses many poetic devices and figurative language, such as images, sounds of words and mood and tone to embed a picture in the reader’s head of what war was really like
When one relives the real memories of a soldier, they can see the brutal imagery of war in their imaginations and understand why the horrors of war cause an everlasting trauma. Happening truth shows how the experiences of war have a heavy impact on the soldier, reciprocating the impact to the audience. The facts provided by real experiences provides a visual imagery of the brutalities of war. A true feeling of war can be felt by from new emotions experienced only in war, emotions that are real. Since the truth is told, readers build a connection and trust with the writer and work in its reliability. Just as Tim O’Brien’s novel shows that happening truth is truer in depicting the nature of war, the nonfiction war novel, “Unbroken”, does the same. The moving war novel, “Unbroken”, provides a detailed description of war which successfully shows that real occurrences are emotional even without added emotion, trauma experienced is forever remembered, and that happening truth has a bigger effect on readers because they know it has occurred. Only happening truth can describe the cold truth of war such as a bomb killing a dozen of soldiers within seconds, instead of producing an emotional fairy tale like fantasy that does not exist in real