Disillusioned Actualities
In the short story “Chickamauga”, the author Ambrose Bierce uses a young boy to connect to his audience with what is the disillusions of war, then leads them into the actuality and brutalities of war. Bierce uses a six year old boy as his instrument to relate to his readers the spirits of men going into combat, then transferring them into the actual terrors of war.
In the beginning of the short story, the young boy is already imprinted with the ideas of war from his father. His father was a former soldier who “had fought against naked savages and followed the flag of his country..” (Bierce 41). The image of war that is imprinted on the young boy from his father is that of nobility and righteous that comes from war.
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The boy awakes from a night of being lost in the woods, a product of pushing the lines of his invisible enemy deep into their own territory and the fright of an unfamiliar animal. He arose to a sight that he is unable to comprehend; that what he is seeing could even be a creation of war. What the boy is confronted with is a horrific and stomach churning scene of “maimed and bleeding men” (Bierce 43) that “crept upon their hands and knees.” (43). Being confronted with the ghastly scene the boy’s ideals of war blind him to the reality of what he is witnessing. An idea that Bierce portrays that even with the sights of battle many men are blinded by their own machismo and idyllic of …show more content…
After he goes to ride the soldier, he his flung from his back and actually sees the soldier, “a face that lack a lower jaw – from upper teeth to the throat was a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone.” (Bierce 44). This is the first glimpse the boy comprehends of the true devastation of war. And at this point the child has his first rational reaction,“terrified at last, ran to a tree near by, got upon the farther side of it and took a more serious view of the situation.” (Bierce 44). The author is using the childes revelation of the violence in war to introduce to his readers the devastation of
Robert Ross is a sensitive, private boy; last person you would expect to sign up to fight in World War One. In The Wars by Timothy Findley, symbols are used in conjunction with Ross’ story to cause readers to reflect on symbols in their own lives, and to allow then to dive deeper into the world of an innocent boy who is placed into a cruel war. The various symbols in The Wars provide for a graphic and reflective reading experience by emphasizing Robert’s connection with nature, his past, and his experiences during the war.
He was a young man in his twenties, pressured by his family and peers to fight for his country despite not wanting to. The use of imagery allows the reader to see through his eyes. Though untrue, the fact is it could have happened. This gives the reader a “taste...
Jarrell also shows us, that the men fighting on both sides are in a way innocent much like children, who have been taken from their sleeping mothers, and forced to go to war, and face its horrors and possibly death. (Bassett)
As Garbarino recognizes, the effects of war and such violence is something that sticks with a child and remains constant in their everyday lives. The experiences that children face involving war in their communities and countries are traumatic and long lasting. It not only alters their childhood perspectives, but it also changes their reactions to violence over time. Sadly, children are beginning to play more of a major role in wars in both the...
The way the characters change emphasises the effect of war on the body and the mind. The things the boys have to do in the act of war and “the things men did or felt they had to do” 24 conflict with their morals burning the meaning of their morals with the duties they to carry out blindly. The war tears away the young’s innocence, “where a boy in a man 's body is forced to become an adult” before he is ready; with abrupt definiteness that no one could even comprehend and to fully recover from that is impossible. The story is riddled with death; all of the dead he’s has seen: Linda, Ted Lavender, Kiowa, Curt Lemon, the man he killed, and all the others without names.
Imagine being in an ongoing battle where friends and others are dying. All that is heard are bullets being shot, it smells like gas is near, and hearts race as the times go by. This is similar to what war is like. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the narrator, Paul Baumer, and his friends encounter the ideals of suffering, death, pain, and despair. There is a huge change in these men; at the beginning of feel the same way about it. During the war the men experience many feelings, especially the loss of loved ones. These feelings are shown through their first experience at training camp, during the actual battles, and in the hospital. Training camp was the first actuality of what war was going to be like for the men. They thought that it would be fun, and they could take pride in defending their country. Their teacher, Kantorek, told them that they should all enroll in the war. Because of this, almost all of the men in the class enrolled. It was in training camp that they met their cruel corporal, Himelstoss.&nbs most by him. They have to lie down in the mud and practice shooting and jumping up. Also, these three men must remake Himelstoss’ bed fourteen times, until it is perfect. Himelstoss puts the young men through so much horror that they yearn for their revenge. Himelstoss is humiliated when he goes to tell on Tjaden, and Tjaden only receives an easy punishment. Training camp is as death and destruction. Training camp is just a glimpse of what war really is. The men do not gain full knowledge of war until they go to the front line. The front line is the most brutal part of the war. The front line is the place in which the battles are fought. Battles can only be described in one word- chaos. Men are running around trying to protect themselves while shooting is in the trench with an unknown man from the other side. This battle begins with shells bursting as they hit the ground and machine guns that rattle as they are being fired. In order to ensure his survival, Paul must kill the other man. First, Paul stabs the man, but he struggles for his life. He dies shortly after, and Paul discovers who he has killed. The man is Gerald Duval, a printer.&n Having to deal with killing others is one of the horrors of war. The men who are killed and the people who kill them could have been friends, if only they were on the same side. The other important battle leaves both Paul and Kropp with injuries.
Bullets fly past his head, a ringing left only after a near-death experience remains in his ear for the rest of his life, which ends five minutes later when he and his fellow soldiers are bombarded with falling bombs. Wartime is a gateway to massacre and life-long mental suffering, labeled as “honorable” with false intentions. People suffer from war, especially those in the military, which is why war and military enrollment should not be so accepted and allowed as it is.
In both, innocent people are killed. War is a common theme in romanticism, characterized by images of valiant warriors, exciting battles, and glory. Bierce contrasts that by showing realistic results of war; a family man trying to do his part is hung, a child is orphaned, and disfigured men helplessly crawl to water. Bierce’s writing style has been called “realism,” as it attempts to make light of what war really is. Bierce was inclined to write about war as he was a veteran of the Civil War himself. His veteran status actually makes his descriptions of the wounded even more haunting, since it is a true to life depiction based on things he had actually seen. The stories are not so much an indictment of war itself as they are indictments of people’s skewed perception of war. Bierce paints a picture of war for what it really is; a tragic and horrible thing, rather than a glorious
In the short story “Chickamauga,” by Ambrose Bierce, there are several examples of imagery throughout the passages that help to describe the horrors of war. Bierce sets the story with a young boy playing war in a forest, who is then approached by a “formidable enemy,” a rabbit. The sudden appearance startles the boy into fleeing, calling for his mother in “inarticulate cries,” and his skin getting “cruelly torn by brambles.” The selection of these details leaves a lucid image in the mind of the reader, allowing them to see a sobbing boy running through the forest, covered in cuts and scratches. It represents the innocence and fear of a child, lost and alone in an unknown place. The birds above his head “sang merrily” as the boy was “overcome
War always seems to have no end. A war between countries can cross the world, whether it is considered a world war or not. No one can be saved from the reaches of a violent war, not even those locked in a safe haven. War looms over all who recognize it. For some, knowing the war will be their future provides a reason for living, but for others the war represents the snatching of their lives without their consent. Every reaction to war in A Separate Peace is different, as in life. In the novel, about boys coming of age during World War II, John Knowles uses character development, negative diction, and setting to argue that war forever changes the way we see the world and forces us to mature rapidly.
War as seen through the eyes of Ambrose Bierce in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge depicts it as truly gritty. The author successfully sends a message of how death is a part of war, and it is not as noble or glorious as one would think it is. Due to popular media, we have this attitude that the protagonist is going to go down in a blaze of glory, and while it may be true for some, it is not like that for everyone. War is rough, dark, and gritty but no one ever wants to talk about those parts of war because it would ruin the fantasy of it.
...it may help us arrive at an understanding of the war situation through the eyes of what were those of an innocent child. It is almost unique in the sense that this was perhaps the first time that a child soldier has been able to directly give literary voice to one of the most distressing phenomena of the late 20th century: the rise of the child-killer. While the book does give a glimpse of the war situation, the story should be taken with a grain of salt.
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...
In this story, Ambrose Bierce, gives the reader an opportunity to face reality and humanness. With detailed descriptions of his character and the setting, we are placed in an awkward predicament. We are forced to look beyond the side of war and side with the fugitive.
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.