The Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner Poem Analysis

Bubblegum Soup In struggles of powers stretching worldwide, nobody wins. Death hunts all sides equally and cooly, whether axis or ally. This is, of course, is in reference to not just all wars, but more specifically the second World War, the War after the War to End All Wars, the cleanup on what the Great War swept under the rug. The second World War not only tore open the scars left by the first, but gave rise to a slew of new ones on the next generation; these scars being even more gruesome than before due to unfortunate advancements in war. Randall Jarrell in his poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” uses tone, and the tone’s subsequent change, diction, and imagery to show the atrocities of war even more so than the most cruel words

Being that the poem is so compact, the individual words serve a mixed purpose with that of the other strategies used. Even still, interesting words such as “State” (Jarrell 1), “hunched” and “fur” (Jarrell 2), and “dream of life” (Jarrell 3) are strewn in the poem. “The ‘belly’ of the ‘State’—which is the name of the B-17 or B-24, but also represents the persona’s "state" (condition or country)” (Dawson). The word “State” alone provides three meanings, all which are applicable to the topic and add further to the meaning behind the words. If taken as meaning the plane the speaker was in, then the name “State” offers a sense of familiarity with the plane from the speaker, showing that the speaker has spent time in the plane before death making the speaker all that more human, thus making his death all the more traumatic. Or “State” could be taken as meaning the condition of the speaker. This could be view as meaning he was in the belly of the condition, the stomach being a turbulent, unpleasant, and be all end all of a situation, like with the phrase “Belly of the beast”. The final way the word “State” can be taken, as a country, leads to the most profound meaning in that the speaker is in the cesspool of the country, where food forced through the mouth is put to be decomposed and pushed through the system for its own benefit, much like the condition mentioned before. In all the ways just a single word can be taken, the effort put forth in selecting the words is evident and the effect clear to see. Jarrell may have known that he could not make a more gruesome memory through brute force of words alone, so he chose not to. Instead opting to leave that to the other figurative language and leaving the words to do the legwork in other areas, such as character development and setting