Bullets flying through the air right over me, my knees are shaking, and my feet are numb. I see familiar faces all around me dodging the explosives illuminating the air like lightning. Unfortunately, numerous familiar faces seem to disappear into the trenches. I try to run from the noise, but my mind keeps causing me to re-illustrate the painful memories left behind. 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. 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...
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.”
The story not only recounts events, but also delves into the deeper meaning behind every war story. In O’Brien’s commentary, he alludes to the fact that the truth is often overlooked, and war is not a one toned subject. The truths of war are conflicting, for war can be an experience of both beauty and horror. The exerperiances that one must endure are inarticulate, and often filled with uncountable emotions. Through the use of literary devices such as imagry, paraxoxies, and juxtopositions of themes, O’Brian was able to create an affective short story that further informed readers of the ‘truth’ behind every war story. Thus, lessening the gap between physical war and war stories.
In the poem titled “Song of Napalm” words capture the images of the horrific scenes the warfare presented. The emotion of someone suffering from PTSD is obvious through out the poem. This narrative poem uses end stopped and enjambmen...
Everyone encounters some type of battle or challenge in their lives. Some have to deal with something like passing a class, some with the stress of not knowing when their next meal will be. Some have to cope with the after-effects of the war. All war veterans have to bear the mental weight of the events that occurred while at war, feelings of fear and guilt, and sometimes the thoughts don’t seem to go away. We see this looking through the psychological lens in the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.
In the story “Soldier’s Home”, the protagonist, Harold Krebs, returned home from World War II much later than the other men from his town had. The townsfolk had already welcomed home the other soldiers, sailors, and marines, giving them an outlet to relate the stories they had from the war and begin the process of healing through finding relative ground with those around them. Once Harold had returned to his hometown, the townsfolk had grown sick of hearing of the atrocities of the war and wanted to put that behind them. This left no avenue for Harold to find closure from all of the horrors he experienced and causing him to withdraw from those with whom he once felt a connection; such as his mother, father, sisters, and women in general.
Intro: Many people are affected by war because of what happens and how they feel during war. The four texts I have studied which portray soldiers in a certain way are ‘Hero of War’ a song by Rise Against, ‘First Blood’ a movie by Ted Kotcheff, ‘Who’s for the game’ a poem by Jessie Pope and ‘Citizen Soldier’ a song by 3 doors down. The portrayal of soldiers is important because people perceive soldiers in different ways. The texts Citizen Soldier and Who’s for the game portray soldiers as being heroic and war in a positive way in comparison to Hero of War and First Blood which show the audience the negative impact on human lives that war can have.
It is estimated that there were 87,500,000 war, military and civilian, deaths in the last century. Writers Stephen Crane, Wilfred Owen, Tim O’Brien, and Kevin Powers have all participated in wars of the last hundred years, and they have written about their experiences in various ways. Wilfred Owen fought in World War I, Stephen Crane was a war reporter in Cuba, Tim O’Brien fought in the Vietnam War, and Kevin Powers fought in the War on Terror in Iraq. Even though these writers fought in different wars, they all have something in common; ………...These writers use imagery, irony, and structure to protest war.
While Wilfred Owen’s poems carry heavy meanings and truths around World War I, I believe that the ideas he is trying to show us are still valid in today’s world. We often hear on the news about American or British soldiers that have been killed fighting in the middle-east, but we hear of these stories almost every day, and I think it is fair to say most people have become fairly de-sensitized to these stories. Wilfred Owen has helped me to realise that this is unacceptable. As societies we do not take any blame for the lives lost at war, but I think that we should be standing up for these soldiers, and demanding that no more lives be lost. Our societies are not giving these modern soldiers the respect they deserve for risking their lives. It is through Owen’s techniques of tone, similes and metaphors that he has helped me to see this.
Another reason why war is a transformative event is because it gets rid of any misconceptions about warfare by showing individuals the reality of the situation. In the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen, the poet summarizes his experiences in war, and expresses his feelings about it. Throughout the poem, the reader can feel Owen’s hatred for the war by his use of many examples of negative imagery, and his feelings are most easily conveyed by the last lines, which read “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori”(Owen 27-28). Owen’s poem expresses his thoughts on how being quixotic, and not asking important questions as a soldier can have very dire consequences. The soldiers believed what they were told about war, which was that war is like a fairytale, and they never bothered asking any questions as to how their elders knew
Have you ever witnessed something that has stuck with you forever? Unfortunately, over the years, our world has had deadly wars and millions of people have died for their country, leaving them with unbearable memories that have stuck with them throughout their lives. More times than not media outlets and the general public think it is a good thing to fight for one’s country, but do not ever learn the truth about what really happens during wars, even the Roman poet Horace said, “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” In “Dulce et Decorum Est” the author Wilfred Owen uses many poetic devices and figurative language, such as images, sounds of words and mood and tone to embed a picture in the reader’s head of what war was really like
These three works illustrate the representation of war from three types of people. First, there are the people who had no direct contact with the war themselves, though perhaps a loved one or a friend of theirs may have died, they were not directly involved. The attitudes of those characters that were not directly involved in the war are distinctly different from those who have returned from participating in the war. Those not directly involved in WWI paint a much less terrorizing representation of the war than those who fought in it. In the last group are those who died fighting in the war. The impressions that war left on this group of people are illustrated through the letters and poems that they wrote during their time in the war. These last two groups represent war in a similarly dark fashion.
Through Owen's recounting of his experiences as a soldier, he can detail the brutality of war and what it can do to ordinary humans. Owen's strong views on war has led to readers sympathising for soldiers and regrettably, shown the true nature of war as not something courageous, but atrocious. War should never have been as it can devolve normal humans into remorseless beings, not able to recover even after going home with loved
	The pounding of shells, the mines, the death traps, the massive, blind destruction, the acrid stench of rotting flesh, the communal graves, the charred bodies, and the fear. These are the images of war. War has changed over the centuries from battles of legions of ironclad soldiers enveloped in glimmering armor fighting for what they believe to senseless acts of guerrilla warfare against those too coward to be draft-dodgers. Those who were there, who experienced the terror first hand were deeply effected and changed forever. In their retinas, images of blood and gore are burned for the rest of their life.
When one relives the real memories of a soldier, they can see the brutal imagery of war in their imaginations and understand why the horrors of war cause an everlasting trauma. Happening truth shows how the experiences of war have a heavy impact on the soldier, reciprocating the impact to the audience. The facts provided by real experiences provides a visual imagery of the brutalities of war. A true feeling of war can be felt by from new emotions experienced only in war, emotions that are real. Since the truth is told, readers build a connection and trust with the writer and work in its reliability. Just as Tim O’Brien’s novel shows that happening truth is truer in depicting the nature of war, the nonfiction war novel, “Unbroken”, does the same. The moving war novel, “Unbroken”, provides a detailed description of war which successfully shows that real occurrences are emotional even without added emotion, trauma experienced is forever remembered, and that happening truth has a bigger effect on readers because they know it has occurred. Only happening truth can describe the cold truth of war such as a bomb killing a dozen of soldiers within seconds, instead of producing an emotional fairy tale like fantasy that does not exist in real
In the poems “Dulce et Decorum Est” written by Wilfred Owen and “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” written by Randall Jarrell, which both touch on the issues of war. In these two poems the Speaker uses imagery, diction, and sorrow to show how brutal the war was. They both convey the horror and futility of dying for a state. “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (Randall Jarrell 1945) and “Dulce et Decorum Est” (Wilfred Owen 1920) examine the impact war has on the soldiers who fight them.