Comparing The Cellist Of Sarajevo And The Ghost Road War

Since the beginning of civilization and even before, humans have been consumed by war. “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” (Galloway 0) a quote by Lean Trotsky acknowledged by Galloway in the epigraph of the book. He is saying that you do not have to want a war to end up in one. Generation after generation learns the hard horrors of war. A warring civilization is like a destroyed building it can be rebuilt but what made up that building can never be replaced. In Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo and Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road war causes irreparable damage. The effects of damage range from the loss of one’s identity including sanity and loss of humanity that leaves civilization merely a ghost of what it

War deprives humans of being humans as a fellow soldier named Hallet says, “he was talking to Owen saying real anti-war poems ought to celebrate what war deprives men of.” (Barker 219). He is saying that it should be recognized that war deprives men and more specifically deprives them of their essential humanity. A doctor named Rivers has seen thousands of injures. “Look at us. We don’t remember, we don’t feel, we don’t think – at least beyond the confines of what’s needed” (Barker 160). Doctor rivers is numb from all the patients he has had. Him and all his colleagues no longer feel bad when someone dies they have lost the most important human attribute emotions. They are only capable of doing their duty as if only a machine. Billy Prior has to survive through a terrible unforgivable war. As Billy says, “I think the worst time was after the counter-attack, when we lay in that trench all day surrounded by the dead.” (Barker 194). Billy and everyone that survived that attacked were scarred by the fact that to survive they had to hide in a trench surrounded and filled with fellow dead soldiers. This haunted Billy Prior and the other soldiers up until the end of the book. There is a lot of killing in war especially in World War 1. Billy Prior thinks, “Murder is only killing in the wrong place” (Barker 54). Billy has a point if he were killing these people anywhere else it would be considered murder but because someone else says that this killing is okay that makes it better. Killing is killing it is always wrong there is nothing human about killing another human. Society as whole is effected by war it changes each and every person damaging the whole population. Slowly it turns people from soulful humans into cruel cold-blooded humans only interested in winning and not the greater picture. As Billy says, “A good Deal of innocence has been lost in recent years not all