Analysis of Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw
"Arms and the Man" starts with gunfire on a dark street in a small town. The romantic and willful Raina is about to begin her true-life adventure by sheltering the handsome fugitive Bluntschli, enemy of her equally handsome fiancé Sergius
The setting of the play is in war-torn Bulgaria, and focuses not only on the romance between the young people of the play, but the atrocities that go on during war times and the ability of people not so very far removed from these atrocities to ignore them completely.
Shaw's purpose in this play is to attack the romantic notion of war by presenting a more realistic depiction of war, devoid of the idea that such death and destruction are both noble and romantic. These deconstructions make "Arms and the Man" a satirical comedy about those who would glorify the horrors or war.
Shaw develops a perfectly ironic contrast between the two central male characters form the beginning to the end. At the start of the play we are given an account of Major Sergius Saranoff’s, a handsome young Bulgarian officer, victory in a daring cavalry raid, which turned the war in favor of the Bulgarians over the Serbs. In contrast, Captain Bluntschil, a professional soldier from Switzerland, acts like a coward. He climbs up to a balcony to escape capture, he threatens a woman with a gun, and he carries chocolates rather than cartridges because he claims the sweets are more useful on the batt...
The outcome of things depends on both the power of the individual and destiny because they tie in with each other. Things do not just happen, randomly, they happen for a reason only to be seen at the end of things. For example, Jim was raised by his parents in Virginia until they died, upon which his relatives shipped him west to his grandparents. This is part of his journey through life which was predetermined. Jim, as an adult writing, realizes that Destiny makes our decisions and nothing need be worried about because he "did not say my prayers that night [the first night on the farm in Nebraska]: here, I felt, what would be would be." (7) The next big chance Jim takes where his is unsure of what will happen is going to college. Over there he befriends Gaston Cleric, a Classics Instructor. Later on Cleric gets a job at Harvard that "he would like to take me East with him. To my astonishment, gran...
“ I am against wars,” no one has to agree with this statement, it 's a personal/ point of view because war harms more than it helps a country. War also affects a person’s identity and morals. In addition, trying to recover from a war is not easy, so many people suffer the consequences after the war is over. War can damage one’s life because it not only affects them physically but also psychologically. In any war people are confronted with physical harm, violence, danger, exploitation, fear and loss. Wars not only harms an individual but it also harms the whole family. Adults are busy surviving during a war, therefore, parents have little time for their children. “The Shawl,” is a story written by Cynthia Ozick about the war. The story is about a jewish mother, Rosa, who lost her infant, Magda, during the Nazis’s attack. Ozick explains the war from a mother and an infant perspective. This is a great point of view because normally war stories are told from
Jay Gatsby and F. Scott Fitzgerald, two different beings, one a book character, the other a human being but both are the same person. Jay Gatsby, as evinced by the the title, is the main character in The Great Gatsby. His goals and achievements is what the novel revolves around. Gatsby is the most interesting character which is why he leaves something to think about in everything he does in the book, but what makes him amazing are the parallels between him and Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald uses Gatsby as a catalyst of his life in the novel.
In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald analyzes three main characters, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, and Nick Carraway. The Great Gatsby is a story about finding out who people really are and how far they will go to protect their secrets from spilling to everyone. The Great Gatsby is like a story of our time, we have the rich and the poor towns, we have people who cheat on their spouses, and lastly, we have racism towards different cultures and races (Schreier). Many ironic events take place throughout the book. For example, Gatsby and Nick become friends, Tom and Myrtle being secret lovers, also, Daisy and Gatsby carrying on an affair, and lastly Daisy running over Myrtle in Gatsby’s car (Coleman). Fitzgerald purposely wrote the book to tell about lovers that were not supposed to be together and how they overcame that and fell in love with one another (Shain). He also wrote the book to relate to American society (Tolmatchoff).
...s, demonstrated through the author's talent, are denouncing the authority figures who were supposed to guide his generation into adulthood but instead turned the youth against each other in the pursuit of superficial ideals. The soldiers were simply the victims of a meaningless war.
play is set in 1912, only 2 years before the outbreak of WW1, and in
Early events from Fitzgerald’s life appear in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald resembles Jay Gatsby, a caring man who obsesses over wealth and luxury and falls in love with a beautiful young woman while stationed at a military camp in the South. Nick Carraway, also similar to Fitzgerald, is described as a young man from Minnesota, educated at an Ivy League school (in Nick’s case, Yale), who moves to New York after the war. After the publication of his books, Fitzgerald fell into a life-style of parties, while writing to earn more money to please Zelda by. Gatsby obtains a lot of wealth at a young age, and dedicates his life to earning possessions and throwing parties that he believes will allow Daisy to love him. Fitzgerald, similar to Nick in The Great Gatsby found this new lifestyle thrilling and dramatic, and, like Gatsby, always admired the very rich. In many ways, The Great Gatsby represents Fitzgerald’s explanation of his feelings about the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald was motivated by his love for a woman who symbolized everything he always wanted, even though she led him toward everything he loathed just like Gatsby.
In this class one key point kept coming up in the readings for me, and that was fate. Fate is an idea that nothing you do will change your final out come in life. Are we able to truly have free will in the way we live and die? Or is it fate and our life’s outcome is out of our control? Is the characters desire to go against fate what truly lead them to this path? In the readings I was never able to say either way but I lean in favor of fate. My three examples of this are the charters Loki, Odin and Oedipus. These three are said to have been fated on how they live, die and even kill in a way that is predestined.
“Glory” is told mainly through the eyes of Shaw, played by Matthew Broderick. At the beginning of the movie, Shaw is fighting in a battle, and manages to survive, despite heavy Union losses. He is horrified with the violence of the war, and returns home to recover from his wounds. Shaw is recruited to lead the newly formed black regiment. Although he has grown up and still retained his abolitionist opinions, he still has doubts about the capability of black troops.
Destiny has always been locked into a connotation, an idea of something spiritual or ethereal. Something out of our control. My faith stops at the recognition I have for the "gift of my life", my birth. I have to have a wondering faith about that because I -- none of us -- know in an absolute way that is provable. Destiny, in it's literal meaning does not presuppose faith as I recognize it. I have no "blind faith," when it comes to determining the outcome of my life - fulfilling my destiny. If it were meant that we were not to use our capabilities as a human, then we would not have been. If we left it all up to fate then why exist?
Gatsby was born into a poor household. He had no wealth and no social background. He meets the love of his life and decides to pursue endlessly to be with her. He even claims “I am the son of some wealthy people in the Midwest- all dead now"(Fitzgerald 34). to get to daisy but in reality he isn’t the son of a wealthy family and his father is alive at the end of the novel. He uses these lies as a way of covering up so people don’t find out what he actually does, smuggling alcohol and earning money illegally. When tom exposes him “He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drug-stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter.” (Fitzgerald 133). Gatsby 's image starts falling apart, the fake image he created brought him his own demise. After returning from the war, Daisy changes drastically from the women he once thought to a women of another man but Gatsby 's image of daisy causes him to pursue her endlessly and leads him to say “I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before”(Fitzgerald 110). “Can 't repeat the past? Why of course you can”(Fitzgerald 116).Gatsby 's image of Daisy is an illusion mistaken for reality. When he leaves in WW1, Gatsby sets out on marrying Daisy. He returns to the states,builds up a million dollar fortune to get to her and expected they be together forever but to instead find out she is married with tom. He says he will repeat the past but it is
William Shakespeare has provided some of the most brilliant plays to ever be performed on the stage. He is also the author of numerous sonnets and poems, but he is best known for his plays such as Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Romeo and Juliet. In this essay I would like to discuss the play and movie, "Romeo and Juliet", and also the movie, Shakespeare in Love. The play Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare is set in the fictional city of Verona. Within the city lives two families, the Capulets and the Montegues, who have been feuding for generations.
t is intriguing that when a person is presented with the ideas of free will or determinism, they usually jump rather quickly to the conclusion of free will. Most people appreciate the genuine freedom that accompanies choice, but do we really possess it? Complete free will would mean that our decisions would be unrelated to other factors such as the environment or genetics. In reality, our free decisions are based on factors that are beyond our own control. When exercising certain choices, we conclude that we have acted freely and distinguish our actions from situations in which we believe were not in our control. The events that are not in our control are pre-determined for us, which lead us on a path to a determined life. Even though we may be making our own unique decisions, they all connect to form a single planned outcome.
A Farewell to Arms is clearly an anti-war novel; the story swifts from naive game playing, through the stages of love and hope, to pure despair and an understanding that a war can lead to no winners. The passionate love story of the novel strengthens the message still more by showing the ironic similarity, but also its discrepancy, with the war. The discrepancy is to be taken into serious account, this discrepancy is the important message of this novel; make love not war.
George Bernard Shaw is known by many as the most significant English playwright since the seventeenth century. He wrote fifty-seven plays in his lifetime, and a vast majority of them were revolutionary in their themes.