In “No One Writes to the Colonel”, Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes about an old colonel. The colonel has a rooster that use to belong to his son, Augustin, who was murdered at a cockfight. The colonel used to be a part of a resistance against the current government, but they ended up surrendering. As a result, the government promised to give each soldier a pension, but the colonel ends up waiting 15 years for it. Since Augustin’s death, the colonel and his wife have been struggling to feed themselves and the rooster and the wife has had enough. The wife and the colonel argue about the keeping the rooster vs selling it. The wife argues practicality, explaining they can not hold out until the cockfights to get money. The colonel defends himself …show more content…
Every Friday the colonel goes to the post office to wait for his pension. He has been doing this for fifteen years and has not received anything. When he goes back home he must listen to his wife rant about waiting long enough and having the patient as an ox to wait fifteen years for the pension. The colonel writes, “‘We have to wait our turn… Our number is 1823’” (22). The colonel refuses to give up the hope that he will receive his pension. Even though he has waited fifteen years for the letter, he will most likely continue to wait at the post office. Even with his wife giving him lectures about it not going to come, he still does not care to give in and continues to go. But he shows a type of nobility to this. He never gets mad at his wife. Even when she lectures him, or when he is waiting for his pension, he never loses his patience. He carries this nobility with him. For example, his wife tells him to go see a lawyer about the pension, and he listens to her and goes. When they are discussing the pension, the lawyer tells him the government won't give him any of the money. The colonel reflects about a memory during the war. Garcia Marquez explains, “As Treasure of the revolution… he had undertaken a difficult six-day journey with the funds of the civil war… half an hour before the treaty was signed” (26). The colonel was taking the money for the revolution to the signing of the treaty. He …show more content…
For instance, when the wife returns home, after going out, the colonel questions as to her whereabouts. She lies telling him that she was walking around town, but eventually come cleans about the truth. She explains, “‘I was with Father Angel… I went to ask him for a loan on our wedding rings’” (41). She is selling her wedding rings because they have no more money for themselves. They are starving throughout the story, and the colonel does not want to sell the rooster. She chooses not to argue with him and instead tries to go with it. But it has gotten to the point where she has to sell her most valuable possession to get money. She lets the colonel keep the rooster, even though the rooster is starving them both because she loves him. But she is only able to put up with it for so long. When the colonel and his wife are talking about her trying selling the wedding rings, she tells him the things she must do so others won't know they are poor. She explains, “Several times I’ve had to put stones on to boil so the neighbors wouldn’t know that we often go for many days without putting on the pot… And you’re dying of hunger… you should realize that you can’t eat pride’” (41-42). She loves the colonel, but she can not handle the sacrifice anymore. He is willing to allow them to go hunger, and wait for the pension instead of selling the rooster, and feeding them both. This drives the wife
As he immerses his audience into combat with the soldiers, Shaara demonstrates the more emotional aspects of war by highlighting the personal lives of the men fighting. For example, when Shaara reveals the pasts of James Longstreet and Lewis Armistead’s, I started to picture them as the men that they were and not as soldiers out for blood. After suffering a devastating loss of three of his children to fever, Longstreet is tossed into battle. In Armistead’s case, he not only suffered the loss of his wife, but also of a friend fighting on the Union side, General Winfield Scott Hancock. Shaara saves his readers a front row seat to the inner turmoil of General Chamberlain regarding his hindering duty as a soldier clashes with his duty to family as he strived to serve the Union as well as protec...
As the war progresses, Caputo requests to go to a line company in the middle of November. This is a change from the “office” position he currently held where he was largely responsible for counting casualties. At this point, the romanticized visions Caputo had of war have been completely shattered and he goes into this transfer being fully aware of this. This change in viewpoint becomes even more clear when compared to the beginning of the novel where Caputo was intrigued by the romance and action of war. While readers would expect more action and typical war stories in this section of the book, Philip Caputo writes anything but. Caputo writes, “It went like that for the rest of the month. It was a time of little action and endless misery…Almost every hour of every night, the radio operators chanted, ‘All secure. Situation remains the same’ (1996: 240). Caputo repeats the phrase “All secure. Situation remains the same” five times throughout this single paragraph. Because of this, readers see the dull and mundane side of war that is often not talked about. In addition, Caputo continues to comment of the large amounts of waiting throughout the autobiography. When most think of the Vietnam War, they picture the “main events”. Similar to the numerous documentaries we watched in class, some of the main points of the war include: The first Indochina War, The Gulf of Tonkin, and the Tet Offensive. These documentaries all focused on these monumental events and because of this, the public perceives this war as the sum of these events. However, what many fail to consider the large gaps in time between these events. It is in these large gaps that little action occurred and most of the soldier’s time was spent waiting as Caputo depicted in this scene. In connection with
Maintaining feudal conditions through violence and intimidation, the army holds the populace in a constant state of fear. Guaranteeing that the peasants stay ill and in need furthers the necessity that they work to stay alive, but prevents them from doing so. This is the paradox of the poor worker, but one the army does not see. The army blindly kills anyone who tries to help the peasants, murdering all the doctors and priests that enter the villages. They do so to keep the peasants in need and in ignorance, to prevent them from learning another way of life. Lacking knowledge of the outside world ensures that the peasants will remain in the plantations, because fear of the unknown is stronger than fear of the known. Acting as feudal knights, the army forces people into the feudal plantation relationship using fear and intimidation.
The dramatic realization of the fact that the war will affect a member of the Chance family is apparent in this quote. The amount of sorrow and emotions felt by the Chance family, and for that matter, all families who had children, brothers, husbands, or fathers, drafted into what many felt was a needless war. The novel brings to life what heartache many Americans had to face during the Vietnam era, a heartache that few in my generation have had the ability to realize.
Another unique aspect to this book is the constant change in point of view. This change in point of view emphasizes the disorder associated with war. At some points during the book, it is a first person point of view, and at other times it changes to an outside third person point of view. In the first chapter of the book, “The Things They Carried,” O’Brien writes, “The things they carried were largely determined by necessity (2).
Life can bring unexpected events that individuals might not be prepared to confront. This was the case of O’Brien in the story, “On the Rainy River” from the book The Things They Carried. As an author and character O’Brien describes his experiences about the Vietnam War. In the story, he faces the conflict of whether he should or should not go to war after being drafted. He could not imagine how tough fighting must be, without knowing how to fight, and the reason for such a war. In addition, O’Brien is terrified of the idea of leaving his family, friends and everything he loves behind. He decides to run away from his responsibility with the society. However, a feeling of shame and embarrassment makes him go to war. O’Brien considers himself a coward for doing something he does not agree with; on the other hand, thinking about the outcome of his decision makes him a brave man. Therefore, an individual that considers the consequences of his acts is nobler than a war hero.
The narrator in “The Things They Carried” deals with the subjective conditions of war. Throughout the story, straining emotions often brought O’Brien’s teams emotions, especially after a death, causes a “crying jag” with a “heavy-duty hurt” (O’Brien 1185). The fury of emotion associated with death begins to erode the sharp minds of the soldiers and become mentally effective. 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 dies” 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 taken place in the psyche of the narrator is repressed directly by the war. The protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is also faced with the task of coping with mental
Colonel Shaw, son of wealthy. He was 23 years old when he enlisted to fight in the War between the States. He is a very honored man and he constantly writes letters to his family. When Colonel Shaw went to war he had to realize how brutal war really was. When he fought in the Battle of Antietam, He was exposed to watching his men fall. But still he showed bravery, because he would yell to go forward when ev...
It is hardly reasonable to expect a man who will forgo employment that allows such benefits like the necessity of food to attend to the needs of a war. Yet some people criticized Henry Miller because he did not take action; he hardly discussed the war in Tropic of Cancer; and, in their opinion, it is his moral obligation as a citizen-writer to address it. However, Miller is defensible only because his “mind is on the peace treaty all the time” (Miller, 143). The silence about the war in the novel suggests a stance of “extreme pacifism,” which is defensible because of his autobiographical honesty about his radical individualism and the artistic intent to describe the beauty of keeping in touch with humanity in spite of eventual annihilation (Orwell, 1 ).
Being forced into a war he has no interest in, Tim O’brien recounts his time fighting in the vietnam war. Many of the soldiers there carried things deep to their hearts. Others carried fear, guilt, and despair of what they had done and what was to come. These physical things were a way these soldiers could cope with their feelings and try and stay sane during these times. “Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.”(1) These letters were coping mechanisms for Jimmy and he read them when he needed comforting or just to read them to help him forget.
... horrors of war such as, his parents who still view war as glamorous and idealistic. War takes a heavy toll on soldiers who fight in it and in these dangerous moments anybody would have gone insane. It takes a very special type of soldier to be able to handle both the psychological and physical challenges that a soldier has to face in everyday battle. A soldier such as this must be capable of handling the sight of a mutilated comrade and not immediately chatter to pieces. The author conveys this message in his extreme use of words with negative connotation such as shells, typhus, dysentery, and trenches. In this portion of the novel a great deal of emphasis is placed on the word death which is repeated several times and standing on its own it holds a great deal of negative connotations. Therefore, due to the severity of the situation and the extensive use of words with negative connotations the overall tone of the novel appeared to be very depressing or serious. This selection also demonstrates just how mythical the character of war that many individuals who have not experienced the tragedy of battle believe to be true by illustrating just how appalling and grim war is in reality.
Carolyn Forche’s “The Colonel” discusses the lack of value towards human life by totalitarian government and the United States’ stake in investigating these powers and challenging them. The speaker in this poem recounts his experience meeting the colonel to show the audience both the amount of presence of the United States in this foreign setting and the Colonel’s lack of regard toward human rights. Figurative language, such as similes, metaphors, and symbols, as well as the speaker’s first-person point of view descriptions reveal her experiences in El Salvador with a cruel military government. These elements in Forche’s poem successfully convey themes of oppression and cruelty, as well as heavy
... could not help themselves, they were not going to be helped. If struggle were encountered, men had personalized ways to reconnect with the real world, and if a tragedy were encountered which affected the entire company, they also found a combined way to cope with this pressure. The priorities of men during the war shifted greatly toward emotional connections to people and events other than the war, and it was these connections that helped them survive and return home. Coping with the stress and burden of war is not an easy task for anyone, yet in The Things they Carried, O'Brien depicts men dealing and coping as much as they can, using only their primeval resources. They learn how to cope with the barest necessities in life, and they learn how to make use of the smallest opportunities to obtain the most relief and joy from every moment in life.
...is interactions with his wife are filled with tension and he is saddened when he reflects upon the men lost during war and the death of his brother.
Dryden uses this exchange to drive the attention on the very idea that there is no true satisfaction in their marriages. The characters can eat their main concourse, but they still long for something tasteful, filling, and satisfactory.