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Emotional and psychological effects of war on soldiers
Psychological and emotional effects of warfare
The psychological effects of war
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“They sent forth men to battle, But no such men return; And home, to claim their welcome, Come ashes in an urn.” (Aeschylus). Aeschylus wrote tragedies, he was a tragedian, and being the first whose works survived is considered the father of modern day tragedy. In the days of Ancient Greece in which Aeschylus lived, there were many wars. Violence is some point of fascination for many of the human species, and Aeschylus understood the tragic side of it as well as anyone. The tumultuous effects if war I those who it touched, so often overlooked. Although women play a small role in The Things They Carried, it is a significant one. Female characters affect the men of the Alpha Company—The men idealize the women and use their presence—in letters, photographs, and even their imagination—as a kind of solace and reminder that a world …show more content…
does exist outside the atrocities of Vietnam.
The girlfriend is there to remind him of home and to distract him from the harsh realities. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things they carried, the women portrayed as merely “girlfriends” may undergo changes like any man at war, seen in Linda and Mary Anne Bell, and the similarities they pose to each other, and to men. “Lives of The Dead” conclude the collection, and contains an interlude of a nine-year-old girl named Linda. Linda was the ‘love’ of Tim’s life, a ‘girlfriend’ in the young schoolyard. Depicted as the ‘girlfriend, in the qualities of physical appearance and pictured ‘feminine’ fragility: “She had poise and great dignity. Her eyes, I remember, were deep brown like her hair, and she was slender and very quit and fragile-looking.” (O’Brien 228). A ‘girlfriend’, the happy comfort: “Linda Smiled at the window.” (O’Brien 229).
While beginning a sweet and innocent, a porcelain child, Linda fights what is so sadly a common ‘war’ against cancer; she had a brain tumor. This ‘war’ and its effects on her body, as well as likely state of mind are shown: “Over the next few weeks Linda wore her new red cap to school every day.” (O’Brien 233). And when gone: “There was a large Band-Aid at the back of her head, a row of black stiches, a piece of gauze taped above her left ear…Lid stared straight ahead, her eyes locked…Later on, she cried…” (O’Brien 235). Cancer treatment, and simply having cancer, causes hair loss, covered by the red cap. Red, a color of seduction-love, and war, wo well symbolizing the purpose of the character by O’Brien. Those deep brown eyes change: “There was something ageless in her eyes- not a child…” (O’Brien 238). As does the body: “The skin at her cheeks was stretched out tight like the rubber skin of a balloon just before it pops open.” (O’Brien 242). Just before, as a balloon, showing an oncoming fate, ominously contrasting to the slenderness; Linda dies, and on the path to death she experiences the darkness, taking ‘life’ from her eyes, and the picturesque slender form turns bloated. She lost, Linda dies at the age of nine, leaving Tim with more than a simple memory, she lost, as everyone did in Vietnam- the US’s truly failed war, and the process changed her. In the ripe center of the collection there is “The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong”, a story told to Tim about a soldier named Mark Fossie who flew in his girlfriend to Vietnam in the hope that her presence could save him from the war. Mary Anne Bell was her name, and through the story her persona changes, but she starts the part she plays, the sweetheart from home: “...seventeen years old, fresh out of Cleveland Heights Senior High. She [has] long white legs and blue eyes and a complexion like strawberry ice cream. Very friendly, too.” (O’Brien 93). Her naiveté characterized by her exterior appearance, how she presents: “She shows up with a suitcase and a one of those plastic cosmetic bags.” (O’Brien 90). And to general affect upon the soldiers as outlined by what she represented: “…a bubbly personality, a happy smile.” (95). Wartime opens an unblemished state, pale and pink imagery of the cute little doll, the sweetness of humanity. Barely out of school, with that young mindset. Rat Kiley notices: “"A real tiger," said Eddie Diamond. "D-cup guts, trainer-bra brains." "She'll learn," somebody said. Eddie Diamond gave a solemn nod. "There's the scary part. I promise you, this girl will most definitely learn." (O’Brien 97). And learn she does, curiosity in the war, going to adventure. As predicted she drifts away from naiveté: “The bubbliness was gone. The nervous giggling, too.” (O’Brien 99). Mary Anne becomes acquainted with the darkness, with the demeanor turn, to a violent mentality. She goes on a raid with the ‘Greenies’, special forces, shocking Rat Kiley with the transformation: "There it is, you got to taste it, and that's the thing with Mary Anne. She was there. She was up to her eyeballs in it. After the war, man, I promise you, you won’t find nobody like her” (O’Brien 101). Mark Fossie loses the girl, from wide eyed to unfazed, knee deep in horror, Mary Anne is erased in the atrocity from the sweet, innocent girl, to a savage, clothed in military garb: “She wore a bush hat and filthy green fatigues; her face was black with charcoal.” (O’Brien 102). The cosmetics have gone black, as coal; the bubbles pop in time out into the vast expanse of air, lost bubbliness; Mark Fossie’s girl is lost in the ‘jungle’. Linda and Mary Anne, two stories, one purpose. Linda is seen like a balloon, a balloon ready to burst and the loss of Mary’s bubbliness. The similarity of this idea, of a bubble lost, like a shield, protecting the girl, that is lost for both. In contrast Mary Anne’s conversion from cosmetics to darkness in charcoals, is an opposite to Linda adding the hat to hide her change. The person is changed. There are ways war changes people, child-like innocence will always be lost, war is darker, there is a loss of humanity: “She was dangerous. She was ready to kill.” (O’Brien 116). She, not just as Mary Anne or the ‘girlfriend’, she humanity, turned from innocence to a killer. Linda, may not be a true story, seemingly used by O’Brien to drive his message home, and ‘aw’ factor with a little girl who has cancer: “And as a writer now, I want to save Linda’s life. Not her body- her life.” (O’Brien 236). Telling stories about others, really about how he cannot face his own experience on his own: “Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.” (O’Brien 246). Women don’t always standup to the fantasy men paint. Mary Anne Bell turns to the jungle, and leaves Mark Fossie broken hearted. Linda’s death leaves Tim trying to capture that feel from childhood in his writing. Reality may not be enough. The good inside of a person is taken away by horror. No matter the time or place, age or gender, war changes everyone. O’Brien highlights sad truths. Mary Anne’s rapid moral degradation from pictured innocence, and convivial nature opposing a violent atmosphere. Linda dying young, and leaving a boy to grow old haunted by it. War seeps in. The modern society cannot go numb to violence. It must be prevented.
In the two novels of recent war literature Redeployment, by Phil Klay, and The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, both call attention to the war’s destruction of its soldiers’ identities. With The Things They Carried, we are introduced to the story of a young Lieutenant Jimmy Cross who is currently fighting in the Vietnam War and holds a deep crush for his college-lover Martha. Jimmy carries many letters from Martha with him throughout the war, and he envisions this romantic illusion in which “more than anything, he want[s] Martha to love him as he love[s] her” (1). However, a conflict quickly transpires between his love for Martha and his responsibilities with the war, in which he is ultimately forced to make a decision between the two.
“Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love. And, it was real. When I write about her now, three decades later, it’s tempting to dismiss it as a crush, an infatuation of childhood, but I know for a fact that what we felt for each other was as deep and rich as love can ever get.”( p.216 ) This passage describe the innermost relationship between life and death. The living Dead has a larger purpose than just explaining what it is like to be in a war. Linda was died at the age of 9 by suffering brain tumor. She gives O'brien a reason to write stories, to internalize her dead. O’Brien figure out that even if someone died, you can still make them alive by telling their stories. Linda is O’Brien’s example that storytelling is the healing process of pain, confusion, and sadness that comes with unexpected death. After she dies, he uses his imagination to bring her back to life, and he also believes that the death can still be alive through literature. The death of Linda portrays how soldiers can deal with death in Vietnam even they encounter so many people dying in the
Many of the short stories within the collection The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, can be compared and contrasted in regards to elements including theme, characters, and technique. In “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” the character Mary Anne Bell appears to be apparently similar to the character Martha from “The Things They Carried,” in that both are young women who have relations with a soldier in the war. Though upon further analysis of Mary Anne, it appears she is far from alike to Martha. Rather, an unexpected parallel can be drawn between the characters Mary Anne and Elroy Berdahl, from “On the Rainy River,” in that both appear to be epitomes of masculinity. The peculiar connection between these characters developed by Tim O’Brien shines a light on the ambiguity of conventional gender roles of men and women.
Euripides’ Bacchae presents a challenge to the identity of the Athenian male citizen. The tragedy undermines masculinity and traditional gender roles by exposing their vulnerability and easy transgression, implicates Athenian ideals of rationality and self-control in the fall of Thebes’ royal household, and complicates the concept of what it means to be a citizen. With Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War looming, Euripides represents the Athenian anxiety as they faced their potential destruction and loss of their city and their identity.
For the Greeks, Homer's Odyssey was much more than just an entertaining tale of gods, monsters, and men, it served as cultural paradigm from which every important role and relationship could be defined. This book, much more so than its counter part The Iliad, gives an eclectic view of the Achean's peacetime civilization. Through Odyssey, we gain an understanding of what is proper or improper in relationships between father and son, god and mortal, servant and master, guest and host, and--importantly--man and woman. Women play a vital role in the movement of this narrative. Unlike in The Iliad, where they are chiefly prizes to be won, bereft of identity, the women of Odyssey are unique in their personality, intentions, and relationship towards men. Yet, despite the fact that no two women in this epic are alike, each--through her vices or virtues-- helps to delineate the role of the ideal woman. Below, we will show the importance of Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa, Clytaemestra, and Penelope in terms of the movement of the narrative and in defining social roles for the Ancient Greeks.
In The Bacchae, I believe that Euripides uses the relationship of male and female to explore the alluring concept of feminine empowerment in a patriarchal society and to demonstrate the cost this empowerment subsequently has on ordered civilization. In this paper, I will argue that Euripides uses the conflictual relation between the genders to criticize the role of women in Greek society while also showing the consequences of a total feminine revolt. Through developing this conflict, Euripides is demonstrating how the path to the most successful civilization is through a balance of masculine rationality and feminine emotional freedom. I will prove this by analyzing the positions of Pentheus, the Bacchants, and Dionysus throughout the play. The character Pentheus
The Things They Carried Women and their Role in The Things They Carried Within the book The Thing’s They Carried, the stories of the male soldiers and their dealings with the Vietnam War. However, he also delves into the stories of the women and how they affected the soldiers and their experiences in Vietnam. While the men dealt with the horrors of war, the women were right at their side, just not in as much of a public view as the male soldiers. O’Brien uses women such as Martha, Linda and Kathleen in The Things They Carried to punctuate how vital remembrance and recompense was to him and other soldiers in Vietnam.
Of all the literary lenses, one would not think that feminism would be a prevalent topic in a war novel. In Tim O’Brien’s iconic book, The Things They Carried, the idea that women were just as important as men acts an important theme, however from a different perspective. Movies and epic war stories tell of the heroic actions of the World’s finest: bulky men with an appetite for battle. Yet, there always lied a backbone. Comfort, inspiration, ease, all things that women provided to soldiers during any war. Yet, sometimes things did not go as planned and rash actions were made. O’Brien’s masterful use of lenses creates an interesting novel, one that will stand the test of time, however, the aspects of the feminist lens provides much insight into the inner lying meanings of the book, mostly in the areas of characters, objects of importance, and the role of gender in the Vietnam War.
The theme of women in the Odyssey is essential in establishing one of the if not the main message in the poem. The paradoxical messages give insights into the lives of the characters and generalizations into the reader's lives. Although this theme would have a noticeable affect on the poem in its absence, it is odd that in a story about war and adventure that they hold such dominating roles. In the setting of the Odyssey, women did not have a status that measured up to that of a man. However, whether seen as demonic or angelic they still hold in the example of Odysseus a significant role in the determination of the final fate of a man.
Medea and Lysistrata are two Greek literatures that depict the power which women are driven to achieve in an aim to defy gender inequality. In The Medea, Medea is battling against her husband Jason whom she hates. On the other hand, in Aristophanes' Lysistrata, the protagonist Lysistrata plotted to convince and organize the female gender to protest against the stubbornness of men. In terms of defining the purpose of these two literatures, it is apparent that Euripedes and Aristophanes created characters that demonstrate resistance against the domination of men in the society.
Aeschylus, was a master dramatist - he liked to portray conflict between persons, human or divine, or between principles.1 His trilogy of plays, the Oresteia, develops many conflicts that must be resolved during the action of the Eumenides, the concluding play of the trilogy. The central theme of the Oresteia is justice (dike) and in dealing with questions of justice, Aeschylus at every stage involves the gods.2 The Oresteia's climactic conflict in the Eumenides revolves around justice and the gods - opposing conceptions of justice and conflicting classes of gods. This essay will describe and discuss these conflicts and, more importantly, the manner in which they are resolved so that the play, and indeed the entire trilogy, might reach a satisfactory conclusion.
Just as this genre exemplifies the masculine ideal, it also promotes the feminine ideal, largely by casting female characters who do not meet this ideal in an antagonistic light, and thus maintains the male-dominant system of the societies which produced these works. This paper therefore argues that female characters in epic poetry, namely The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, and Vergil’s Aeneid, play the role of an antagonistic “Other” group by employing their agency to act beyond the established gender roles of their societies, thereby disrupting the social order and creating obstacles for the male protagonists.
Homer, Iliad is the narration of the Trojan war. The Trojan war was one of the most important and significant wars of Greek mythology, Homer described how the war was triggered by the abduction of the most beautiful women known as Helen. This paper will argue how the traditional view of this poem is accurate because it indeed was Helens beauty and her selfishness that sparked the Trojan war. Although Helen was not happy about the outcomes of her mistakes. This paper will present how Helen faced many forms of self judgment, how she created many relationships with significant characters, such as Paris, Priam and Aphrodite. Homers portrayal of this significant women was remarkable as we were able to feel her pain and anguish, the readers were
The ineffaceable impression which Sophocles makes on us today and his imperishable position in the literature of the world are both due to his character-drawing. If we ask which of the men and women ofGreek tragedy have an independent life in the imagination apart from the stage and from the actual plot in which they appear, we must answer, ‘those created by Sophocles, above all others’ (36).
The poem “Iliad,” by Homer, is known for its violence between men during a war, but under that violence, is the different type of women who play a significant role in the poem (Homer 189). This poem’s narrative seems to show a male dominated world between the Greek commanders. This male dominated world cannot happen on its own, thus the different background roles of women are needed in order to make sense of all this rage. As the University of Michigan article How Do Women Make Their Way Into This Cycle states, “They are seen as the objects of both lust and domesticity, yet they are also used to excuse war, cause conflict, and display the power of men” (www.umich.edu). The focus in this poem steers towards the rage between the men, but this rage most of the time is inspired and initiated by a woman. The women of Iliad play a significant role in the poem such as war prizes, male hero partners, and women gods.