The period following the Korean War was a time of change - a conflict between old and new ideas of economy, family, values, and ideals. Many Koreans at the time had trouble adjusting after the war, often feeling like they do not fit in. The 1960 Korean film, A Stray Bullet, depicts the social situation in South Korea after the war, using its characters to represent the struggle during the time of change. The Song family are in poverty and many war veterans are unemployed after the armistice. In the film, Higson’s ideas of “home” and “away” are observed. The “home” in the film is Korea during the war, when Young-ho and his friends had jobs as soldiers. On the other hand, the “away” is the post-war Korea, where the Song family faces hardships. …show more content…
Throughout the film, the grandmother repeats, “Let’s go”. Like the grandmother, many Koreans were running away from their homes to escape the tragedies of war. Even though the “home” was a place in which Young-ho had a job (as a soldier), he denies going back. When he was offered a job as an actor, he rejected it because he did not want to “sell” his war scar for a living. This shows that even though he is unable to settle in the “away” Korea (post-war Korea), he refuses going back “home”. From Young-ho, we see that the characters in the film may be caught in between the “home” and the “away”. The end of the war was the transition point and caused many Koreans, like Young-ho, to be lost. We see that Young-ho is confused when his lover, Seol-hui, was killed. Following her death, he disagrees with Seol-hui’s note which read, “nothing is solved with a gun like it used to during wartime”. Instead, he believes that courage is what he needs to break out of his misery. However, in the end, he painfully realizes that he cannot solve his problems in the “away” by reverting to what he did in the “home” (using a gun). Like a stray bullet lost in its path, Young-ho is lost in between “home” and “away” and cannot find where he belongs. Furthermore, in the end of the movie, we see that Cheol-ho is also lost. After losing his wife and brother and still left with a toothache, he does not want to continue living in the “away” Korea. Even though he has a job in the post-war Korea, he too, in the end wishes to leave finding himself not belonging in his country. Like his grandmother, Cheol-ho finds himself saying, “Let’s
The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, transports the reader into the minds of veterans of the Vietnam conflict. The Vietnam War dramatically changed Tim O’Brien and his comrades, making their return home a turbulent and difficult transition. The study, titled, The War at Home: Effects of Vietnam-Era Military Service on Post-War Household Stability, uses the draft lottery as a “natural experiment” on the general male population. The purpose of the NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) study is to determine the psychological effects of the Vietnam War on its veterans. In order to do this, they tested four conditions, marital stability, residential stability, housing tenure, and extended family living. However, it neglects the internal ramifications of war that a soldier grapples with in determining whether they are “normal” in their post-war lives. Thus, effects such as alienation from society, insecurity in their daily lives, and the mental trauma that persist decades after the war are not factored in. After reading the NBER study, it is evident that Tim O’Brien intentionally draws the reader to the post-war psychological effects of Vietnam that may not manifest themselves externally. He does this to highlight that while the Vietnam war is over, the war is still raging in the minds of those involved decades later, and will not dissipate until they can expunge themselves of the guilt and blame they feel from the war, and their actions or inaction therein.
As a young teen, she huddled in a bomb shelter during intense artillery shelling of her hamlet, escaping out a rear exit just as US Marines shouted for the “mama-sans” and “baby-sans” (women and children) to come out the front. She got as far as the nearby river before she heard gunfire. Returning the next day, she encountered a scene that was seared into her brain. “I saw dead people piled up in the hamlet. I saw my mom’s body and my younger siblings,” told Ho Thi Van. She lost eight family members in that 1968 massacre. In all, according to the local survivors, thirty-seven people, including twenty-one children were killed by the Marines. She then joins the guerrillas and fought the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies until she was grievously wounded, losing an eye in battle in
When the war was over, the survivors went home and the world tried to return to normalcy. Unfortunately, settling down in peacetime proved more difficult than expected. During the war, the boys had fought against both the enemy and death in far away lands; the girls had bought into the patriotic fervor and aggressively entered the workforce. During the war, both the boys and the girls of this generation had broken out of society's structure; they found it very difficult to return.
Ultimately, “Soldiers Home” is a delightfully lean and simplistic story that tells the tale of a soldier’s struggle to adapt to the old ways of the world. Even though that the plot of the story may be an annoyance to some, the overlying
In movies, a soldier's homecoming is depicted as one of honor and courage. Hollywood tends to glamorize war and not show the true effects of the mentality of a woman or man who have just returned home after the war. In the poem, "Homespace", by Anthony Grooms, the psychological state of the soldier's return home is displayed more true to that of Hollywood's. The boy returns home and is embraced by his mother. The family has a barbeque for the boy's homecoming. Even though he is at home, where he should feel safe and secure, the boy remains in war-like state of mind. He isolates himself from everyone else, "I made myself busy with the fire/ So I wouldn't have to talk," (Line 7-8). The young man, "heard screams" (Line 9), when fuel was added to the coals. Men and women of war are tormented by the images they seen and heard. No one person at this gathering seemed to take notice of the impression that the war left on this boy, mentally. It seems as though, because the boy was home and no physical evidence appeared on his body, they assumed everything was in good condition. Not noticing the boy's problem, "Women and children laughed from the porch/ Men sat under the elms" (Line 11-12). All the while these ignorant people sat enjoying themselves, the boy, "watched the sky for the enemy" (Line 13). This last line adequately describes the mind frame of the boy and in all probability many of men and women who fight in wars for their countries.
In Firearms: A Global History to 1700, Kenneth Chase investigates why Europe perfected firearms when the Chinese invented them. Kenneth Chase is an attorney at law who received his PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. He uses primary sources in the form of texts and paintings as well as secondary sources in this monograph to trace the origin and spread of firearms. He also uses these sources to characterize militaries and determine why they used or did not use firearms. Chase dismisses the notion that the discrepancy between Eastern and Western firearms development was the result of cultural aversion. If anything, he argues that Europeans were more averse to firearms due to its association to Satan and a general
By any measure, The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong, known as Hanjungnok (Records written in silence), is a remarkable piece of Korean literature and an invaluable historical document, in which a Korean woman narrated an event that can be described as the ultimate male power rivalry surrounding a father-son conflict that culminates in her husband’s death. However, the Memoirs were much more than a political and historical murder mystery; writing this memoir was her way of seeking forgiveness. As Haboush pointed out in her informative Introduction, Lady Hyegyong experienced a conflict herself between the demands imposed by the roles that came with her marriage, each of which included both public and private aspects. We see that Lady Hyegyong justified her decision to live as choosing the most public of her duties, and she decided that for her and other members of her family must to be judged fairly, which required an accurate understanding of the her husband’s death. It was also important to understand that Lady Hyegyong had to endure the
...reviously held, alienated from his own people including from his sympathetic comrade Noble and the old woman in whose house they were staying; alienated from both earth and heaven, and “the birds and the bloody stars” (O’Connor 5). The cozy dusk that opens the narrative gives way to darkness. The pleasant community of banter and card playing is replaced by isolation. The young soldier, who felt like an adult at the beginning of the narrative, feels “very small and very lost and lonely like a child astray in the snow” at the end. (O’Connor 5). The last sentence, “And anything that ever happened to me after I never felt the same about again,” indicates the permanent break between the narrator’s morally comfortable youth and his present pain. He is left feeling isolated from the nation in whose cause he murdered both an enemy-friend and his own youthful patriotic self.
In The Sniper by Liam O’Flahetry not even family can be trusted. War will ruin lives and relationships with loved ones. War is full of dilemma , which could be solved in a orderly fashion rather than a crazy disaster where young people die. The external the internal and the setting shows how war will ruin lives.
In Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, numerous themes are illustrated by the author. Through the portrayal of a number of characters, Tim O’Brien suggests that to adapt to Vietnam is not always more difficult than to revert back to the lives they once knew. Correspondingly the theme of change is omnipresent throughout the novel, specifically in the depiction of numerous characters.
All around the world, people are being forced to leave their homes due to war, persecution, and unequal treatment; these people are called refugees. When they flee, refugees leave behind their homes, family, friends, and personal possessions. They make risky escapes and their lives could be easily taken from them. Refugees often become distant and depressed as they experience these traumatic events. In the novel Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, ten year-old Hà and her family live in South Vietnam: a war torn country. Hà was like any ten year-old; she liked to stay close to her mother and got jealous when things didn’t go her way. She loves her home and wanted to stay, even when the war between the North and South got closer to home.
The forgotten war, his childhood gone. He was 17 when birds in the morning were replaced with the sounds of guns shooting. The life of a war survivor is tragic but usually long lived with the will and strength to do so. Ko Un was a mere high school student, when the Korean War began. And as the final battle ceased, he remained while his relatives and friends did not. Most of Korea's history has been bloody, but this man decided to spend his remaining time on Earth in peace. Underlying in Ko Un’s poetry, or more specifically his poems Two Beggars and If May Passes by Forgotten, we are able to identify that both religion and heritage has shaped his ideals in his poems by expressing compassion, history, and the unification of people under certain
Finally, O’Brien uses the two themes of pride and isolation to show how they felt in the war and out of war. The soldiers were young when they were in the war and they took pride for their country, but once they stepped back to the real world they were alone and isolated from everyone regretting what happen over there. Most of them all faced the same problems in the war and after the war. They thought they were doing things the right way by going to Vietnam, but they didn’t foresee it would affect them in the
In Soldier’s Home, Ernest Hemingway is a story about a young soldier returning to his home town, bring home some drama to his life that he collected in war. Trying to find himself within his family members, despising the lies he is hearing. Having some sort of trouble to fit back into the society, living the life he once lived before he was sent to war. Harold Krebs suddenly felt trapped in his own world. The main theme of the story was the change Krebs made during his permanence in war, his emotional roller coaster that he saw at war that would affect him permanently. The writer described Krebs as a person who lost it all when he came back home, he has to choose isolation by detaching himself from social relations, love, religion. The writer wrote this story out of his experience and emotion in Krebs personality, which illustrates the insights into his arrival home and his understanding of the dilemmas of the returned war veteran.
Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” is a short story that shows how a soldier copes with civilian life after war and the struggles that Harold Krebs, Hemingway’s protagonist, experiences throughout his familiar, but new life. With changes in his view about the world it adds to his problem with adjusting to his life. “Soldier’s Home” uses the setting and characters to explain the theme of the story of a soldier’s transition to normality. Several symbolism is used by Hemingway to explain the story. The title “Soldier’s Home”, symbolizing a soldier’s toughest challenge to change his way of living since the job is done.