In the poem, “Building why its Face Blown off” by Billy Collins focuses on the effects a traumatic war can have on someone. The author is trying to show the seriousness of what can happen during a war. Sitting back and waiting for something like this to happen in your life is not the way to go, get prepared for the worst. War is not something that people ask for, but it is not something that everyone thinks can happen where they live. In this poem the author conveys three serious points about war: a war can take away your dignity, a war can happen anywhere at anytime, and a war is not like a performance, you don’t get to chose the way it turns out. When something is taken away from you so quickly, your dignity goes with it. The poem start off by saying, “How suddenly the private is revealed in a bombed-out city” (1-2). Those first couple lines go to show how quickly things can change in what seemed to be a normal day. Billy Collins stats, “wearing only its striped pajamas” (7). The house was caught off guard, left naked and bare. The poem goes continues on to say, “And the bathroom looks almost embarrassed by its uncovered …show more content…
People look at war scenes as being like a dollhouse you can just reach in a clean up real fast. It’s like you want to make all the bad things go away, like a bad dream. The author wants us to realize that it is much more than that it doesn’t just go away when you want it to. Like for instance, “just the broken furniture in the street, a shoe among the cinder blocks, a light snow falling” (26-28). These streets are where his home was, now they are covered in the remains of what was his home, and the air is covered in the ashes from the bombing. In life you don’t just get to reach inside the dollhouse and pick up the fallen piece, it’s
Brian Turner's "The Hurt Locker" captures his personal and painful experiences during his time spent in war and furthermore, express the tragic events he witnessed. Brian Turner's poem is miraculously able to gather multiple first hand accounts of tragic, gory, and devastating moments inside a war zone and project them on to a piece of paper for all to read. He allows the audience of his work to partially understand what hell he himself and all combat veterans have endured. Although heartbreaking, it is a privilege to be taken inside "The Hurt Locker" of a man who saw too many things that should not ever be witnessed by anybody. Turner's words bring to life what many have buried deep inside them which subsequently is one of the major underlying problems facing combat veterans today. Reading this poem, I could not help but wonder what the long term effects of war are on a human being, if it is worth the pain, and how does a combat veteran function properly in a society that is unfamiliar with their experiences?
In the aftermath of a comparatively minor misfortune, all parties concerned seem to be eager to direct the blame to someone or something else. It seems so easy to pin down one specific mistake that caused everything else to go wrong in an everyday situation. However, war is a vastly different story. War is ambiguous, an enormous and intangible event, and it cannot simply be blamed for the resulting deaths for which it is indirectly responsible. Tim O’Brien’s story, “In the Field,” illustrates whom the soldiers turn to with the massive burden of responsibility for a tragedy. The horrible circumstances of war transform all involved and tinge them with an absurd feeling of personal responsibility as they struggle to cope.
Tim O’Brien states in his novel The Things They Carried, “The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat” (77). This profound statement captures not only his perspective of war from his experience in Vietnam but a collective truth about war across the ages. It is not called the art of combat without reason: this truth transcends time and can be found in the art produced and poetry written during the years of World War I. George Trakl creates beautiful images of the war in his poem “Grodek” but juxtaposes them with the harsh realities of war. Paul Nash, a World War I artist, invokes similar images in his paintings We are Making a New World and The Ypres Salient at Night. Guilaume Apollinaire’s writes about the beautiful atrocity that is war in his poem “Gala.”
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.
As can be seen, Paul Boyer, Tim O’Brien, and Kenneth W. Bagby, convey the notion that war affects the one’s self the most. Through the use of literary devices: tone, mood, pathos, and imagery, these 3 authors portray that war affects a person’s self most of all. War is not only a battle between two opposing sides, but it can also be a mental conflict created within a person. Although war is able to have an effect on physical relationships between family, friends, or even society, conflict within oneself is the most inevitable battle one must face during war times.
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, written by the talented author Chris Hedges, gives us provoking thoughts that are somewhat painful to read but at the same time are quite personal confessions. Chris Hedges, a talented journalist to say the least, brings nearly 15 years of being a foreign correspondent to this book and subjectively concludes how all of his world experiences tie together. Throughout his book, he unifies themes present in all wars he experienced first hand. The most important themes I was able to draw from this book were, war skews reality, dominates culture, seduces society with its heroic attributes, distorts memory, and supports a cause, and allures us by a constant battle between death and love.
This whole story is based around the horrors and actions which take place during war, and we therefore get involved in the scenery of war and become very familiar of what the characters must feel.
Wars affect everyone in some way, especially soldiers who fight in them, like those in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. O 'Brien concentrates a lot on the psychological trauma that solders, like himself, confronted before, during, and after the Vietnam War. He also focuses on how they coped with the brutality of war. Some were traumatized to the point where they converted back to primitive instinct. Others were traumatized past the breaking point to where they contemplated suicide and did not fit in. Finally, some soldiers coped through art and ritual.
...often times tragic and can ruin the lives of those who fight. The effects of war can last for years, possibly even for the rest of the soldiers life and can also have an effect on those in the lives of the soldier as well. Soldiers carry the memories of things they saw and did during war with them as they try and regain their former lives once the war is over, which is often a difficult task. O’Brien gives his readers some insight into what goes on in the mind of a soldier during combat and long after coming home.
In Brian Turner’s poem “Jundee Ameriki” (American soldier), he gives gruesome details of a situation that triggered posttraumatic stress disorder in a soldier of war. The poem, written in 2009, addresses a suicide bombing which occurred during the War on Iraq in November of 2005. At first the poem shares the events of his doctor’s visit. While getting the shrapnel fragments removed, the soldier is quickly reminded of the horrific events that led to the injury. The poem then begins to describe the emotional effects of posttraumatic stress disorder. The narrator uses symbolism and the structure of the poem to demonstrate how the emotional pain of posttraumatic stress disorder is much greater than the physical pain it causes (even if the emotional
Lawrence Hill Books, c2009 Bracken, Patrick and Celia Petty (editors). Rethinking the Trauma of War. New York, NY: Save the Children Fund, Free Association Books, Ltd, 1998.
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.
One of the worst things about war is the severity of carnage that it bestows upon mankind. Men are killed by the millions in the worst ways imaginable. Bodies are blown apart, limbs are cracked and torn and flesh is melted away from the bone. Dying eyes watch as internal organs are spilled of empty cavities, naked torso are hung in trees and men are forced to run on stumps when their feet are blown off. Along with the horrific deaths that accompany war, the injuries often outnumber dead men. As Paul Baumer witnessed in the hospital, the injuries were terrifying and often led to death. His turmoil is expressed in the lines, “Day after day goes by with pain and fear, groans and death gurgles. Even the death room I no use anymore; it is too small.” The men who make it through the war take with them mental and physical scarification from their experiences.
Sassoon shows many examples of how the soldier in this poem gets pulled back into war-like terrors by meaningless things. The soldier is simply sitting in his home yet gets flashbacks of war and it haunts him. In this poem Sassoon is using a soldier as the example of repression as someone who has experienced war and the impacts it has on life after. “The poetic evolution related directly to Sassoon 's war experiences was initially gradual. His poetry became more serious and evocative in the early days of the war, but continued to inhabit the fatal logic of soldierly glory in poetic uniform” Avi Matalon claims (30). Poetry was influenced greatly by World War I and left poets creating new pieces that they never would have imagined
The simple definition of war is a state of armed competition, conflict, or hostility between different nations or groups; however war differs drastically in the eyes of naive children or experienced soldiers. Whether one is a young boy or a soldier, war is never as easy to understand as the definition. comprehend. There will inevitably be an event or circumstance where one is befuddled by the horror of war. For a young boy, it may occur when war first breaks out in his country, such as in “Song of Becoming.” Yet, in “Dulce et Decorum Est” it took a man dying in front of a soldier's face for the soldier to realize how awful war truly is. Both “Song of Becoming” and “Dulce et Decorum Est” are poems about people experiencing the monstrosity of war for the first time. One is told from the perspective of young boys who were stripped of their joyful innocence and forced to experience war first hand. The other is from the perspective of a soldier, reflecting on the death of one of his fellow soldiers and realizing that there is nothing he can do to save him. While “Song of Becoming” and “Dulce et Decorum Est” both focus on the theme of the loss of innocence, “Song of Becoming” illustrates how war affects the lives of young boys, whereas “Dulce et Decorum Est” depicts the affect on an experienced soldier.