Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Essay for women in wars
Essay for women in wars
Essay for women in wars
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
War may be seen as a story only about men. However, the role of women might change people’s perspective of war’s impact. Remarque in his novel All Quiet On the Western Front describes young soldiers’ struggle in World War I, and O’Brien in his novel The Things They Carried reveals young soldiers’ sorrow in the Vietnam War. Despite the time gap, both novels uses literary devices such as selection of detail, tone and imagery to portray how young soldiers see women as the tint of light and fantasy in their darkness. In All Quiet On the Western Front, Remarque isolates women from the war, reinforcing women’s superficiality. While in The Things They Carried, O’Brien portrays women as human beings equally capable of evilness and savagery as all men, …show more content…
Remarque uses imagery to show Baumer’s fall into the idea and feeling of love and intimacy. The fact that at that moment he throws away his identity as a soldier, and hopes that moment can last forever reveals a young soldier’s desire of belonging and simple happiness. He sees those women, and the interactions with them, as a paradise with only joy and relaxation.
On the other hand, the two novels diverge on the idea of women’s capacity for savagery. In All Quiet On the Western Front, Remarque describes women as only superficial figures who live in a world that is unfamiliar and distant from the world of war. Remarque introduces the appearance of women by stating, “A girl in a light summer dress, with a red patent-leather belt about her hips! She is standing with one hand on a railing and with the other she holds a straw hat” (Remarque 141). The selection of detail Remarque uses to delineate the girl’s clothing shows how the girl is unfit in war. The delicacy of a dress and a straw hat reveals a palpable contrast with the rigidness and strength of soldiers’ combat clothing. “She is a lovely girl with a delicate nose, red lips, and slender legs, wonderfully clean and well cared for” (140) continues to show women’s superficiality in front of men
The Things They Carried Women and their Role in The Things They Carried Within the book The Thing’s They Carried, the stories of the male soldiers and their dealings with the Vietnam War. However, he also delves into the stories of the women and how they affected the soldiers and their experiences in Vietnam. While the men dealt with the horrors of war, the women were right at their side, just not in as much of a public view as the male soldiers. O’Brien uses women such as Martha, Linda and Kathleen in The Things They Carried to punctuate how vital remembrance and recompense was to him and other soldiers in Vietnam.
In the book “The Things They Carried” four female characters played an important role in the lives of the men. Whether imaginary or not, they showed the power that women could have over men. Though it's unknown if the stories of these women are true or not, they still make an impact on the lives of the soldiers and the main narrator.
All Quiet on the Western Front is a powerful novel that communicates many messages concerning war’s hidden horrors and gives insight into the unique experiences of soldiers. Remarque uses a wide array of language techniques and writing concepts to expose readers to truth of the simultaneously corrupt yet complex affair that is war. It is an important, genuine novel – the type that needs to exist to end dreadful human affairs, such as
use nature as the judge to condemn war, along with shocking imagery, so that his
Remarque demonstrates Baumer's disaffiliation from the traditional by emphasizing the language of Baumer's pre- and post-enlistment societies. Baumer either can not, or chooses not to, communicate truthfully with those representatives of his pre-enlistment and innocent days. Further, he is repulsed by the banal and meaningless language that is used by members of that society. As he becomes alienated from his former, traditional, society, Baumer simultaneously is able to communicate effectively only with his military comrades. Since the novel is told from the first person point of view, the reader can see how the words Baumer speaks are at variance with his true feelings. In his preface to the novel, Remarque maintains that "a generation of men ... were destroyed by the war" (Remarque, All Quiet Preface). Indeed, in All Quiet on the Western Front, the meaning of language itself is, to a great extent, destroyed.
Many of Remarque’s ideas expressed in All Quiet on the Western Front were not completely new. Remarque emphasized things that portrayed the magnitude of issues soldiers face, and how the physical body and senses affects their emotional well-being. The ideas in All Quiet in the Western Front of not knowing the difference between sleep and death, seeing gruesome sights of people, and frustration towards people who cannot sympathize with soldiers, are also shown in Siegfried Sassoon’s “The Dug-Out”, Giuseppe Ungaretti’s “Vigil”, and Sassoon's’ “Suicide in the Trenches”.
In this novel, Remarque thoroughly outlines the horrors of war. Remarque identified young, inexperienced boys who have joined up from the same class as volunteers for WWI. The narrator, Paul Baumer, becomes closely acquainted to his friends and soon, they develop a strong bond. This bond will help one another throughout the book and will cause many of them to maintain some of their sanity and to be there for each other, no matter the circumstance. Remarque also expresses his disgust towards savagery, hungry-for-power people. Such as Himmelstoss, who is the most feared disciplinarian in the training camps. He treats his recruits as if he enjoys oppressing them. Soon, Himmelstoss will experience the same traumatic
War is like a coming of age story; except the story is on fast forward, everything is happening too fast, and children are forced to become adults before they are full grown. Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried showcases this coming of age, and the rendering of innocence that comes with it. He uses women as symbols to convey this loss of innocence to the reader. Martha, Linda, and Mary Anne all represent different aspects of innocence, and how the war tarnishes them. This corruption of innocence emphasizes how the war forces the soldiers to grow up too fast.
In The Things They Carried, an engaging novel of war, author Tim O’Brien shares the unique warfare experience of the Alpha Company, an assembly of American military men that set off to fight for their country in the gruesome Vietnam War. Within the novel, the author O’Brien uses the character Tim O’Brien to narrate and remark on his own experience as well as the experiences of his fellow soldiers in the Alpha Company. Throughout the story, O’Brien gives the reader a raw perspective of the Alpha Company’s military life in Vietnam. He sheds light on both the tangible and intangible things a soldier must bear as he trudges along the battlefield in hope for freedom from war and bloodshed. As the narrator, O’Brien displayed a broad imagination, retentive memory, and detailed descriptions of his past as well as present situations. 5. The author successfully uses rhetoric devices such as imagery, personification, and repetition of O’Brien to provoke deep thought and allow the reader to see and understand the burden of the war through the eyes of Tim O’Brien and his soldiers.
All Quiet on the Western Front is a historical novel written by Erich Maria Remarque. The novel focuses on a young German soldier and the predicaments he encounters during his life on the front. The novel displays a powerful image to all of its readers and tends to have a long lasting effect on the way that they interpret war. All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel that encourages nations to consider the horrible hostilities that war brings on humans before entering into global conflicts. From his graphic imagery and his detailed description of character relationships, Remarque depicts the brutality of the war at the front.
All Quiet on the Western Front includes many clear-cut examples of irony throughout the duration of the novel. From word play in the names of the characters that led to dramatic irony, to the paradox that is obvious in the setting, and finally the situational irony that is critical to the impact of the character’s death on the reader, Remarque provides depth to the novel and the emotional connection that the reader has to the characters in the book.
Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel that takes you through the life of a soldier in World War I. Remarque is accurately able to portray the episodes soldiers go through. All Quiet on the Western Front shows the change in attitudes of the men before and during the war. This novel is able to show the great change war has evolved to be. From lining your men up and charging in the eighteenth century, to digging and “living” in the trenches with rapid-fire machine guns, bombs, and flame-throwers being exposed in your trench a short five meters away. Remarque makes one actually feel the fun and then the tragedy of warfare. At the beginning of the novel Remarque gives you nationalist feelings through pride of Paul and the rest of the boys. However at the end of the war Remarque shows how pointless war really is. This is felt when everyone starts to die as the war progresses.
Of all the literary lenses, one would not think that feminism would be a prevalent topic in a war novel. In Tim O’Brien’s iconic book, The Things They Carried, the idea that women were just as important as men acts an important theme, however from a different perspective. Movies and epic war stories tell of the heroic actions of the World’s finest: bulky men with an appetite for battle. Yet, there always lied a backbone. Comfort, inspiration, ease, all things that women provided to soldiers during any war. Yet, sometimes things did not go as planned and rash actions were made. O’Brien’s masterful use of lenses creates an interesting novel, one that will stand the test of time, however, the aspects of the feminist lens provides much insight into the inner lying meanings of the book, mostly in the areas of characters, objects of importance, and the role of gender in the Vietnam War.
Throughout their lives, people must deal with the horrific and violent side of humanity. The side of humanity is shown through the act of war. This is shown in Erich Remarque’s novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front”. War is by far the most horrible thing that the human race has to go through. The participants in the war suffer irreversible damage by the atrocities they witness and the things they go through.
Remarque also tried to teach his audience. Written within a decade of the end of the war, the book calls on those who forfeited their youth to the war not to allow time to hide what had happened. Time may heal all wounds, but the cause of those wounds must not be forgotten, nor allowed to repeat itself. The author is; however, pragmatic enough to realize that all will not learn the lesson; nevertheless, those who are willing to learn it will discover that the story has been told before, and without their intervention, it is doomed to be told again.