Wilfred Owen's Dulce Et Decoru Decorum Est

Literature changed drastically from the Victorian Era to the Modern Era. Most notably, the Modern Era is known as the anti-heroic age. Writers of this time stopped believing that heroes came in the traditional sense. They instead portrayed them as the main character of the story but not with the traditional heroic qualities such as courage, honesty, and courtesy. This shift toward the anti-hero was caused by a change in the fundamental thinking of people of the time. The Modern Era was also the era when the World Wars were occurring. People of the time were finally seeing the world for what it was, cold and cruel. The literature from this era reflects this. The movement toward the anti-hero is caused by a change in the way people saw the world at the time. In Wilfred Owen’s poem, “Dulce Et

He describes one of the soldiers, “before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning” (Owen ln 15-16). With the wars going on, people began to view the world differently. They stopped seeing the world as a utopian society where everyone is a hero in their own life. They realized that life is not made up of heroes from fairy tales, and modern day heroes were just ordinary people. A representation of the new beliefs comes in the contrast of the title and the work. The title translates roughly to, it’s an honor to die for one’s country. The poem describes the horrors of war and how terrible it is to die that way. The contrast highlights how different it is supporting the war versus being in the war. In V.S. Naipaul’s, “One Out of Many”, the main character Santosh struggles to find his identity in the new world he is living in. In short stories written