Death Of A Ball Turret Gunner Essay

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The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner is a poem about many different subjects. In just it’s short five lines one can see that it has depth far beyond the actual length of the poem. The author Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville, Tennessee on May 6, 1914. He went on to teach at the University of Texas just before joining the US Air Force. Jarrell did write some before he joined to military but his most popular works (including this poem) were written after his service in the Air Force and his work was heavily influenced by it. On the very surface The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner is a poem about just that. A soldier who goes into battle and dies. Jarrell paints a gruesome picture about being awakened by flack cannons and being killed shortly thereafter by the same things. In all his works Jarrell never glamorizes the war and never attempts to make sense of or find meaning in it. Instead he simply uses the horrors of battle to fuel his works by drawing comparisons from the grand scale of world war to the mundane aspects of everyday life. The first and most popular analogy that Jarrell draws is the comparison of the ball turret to a mother’s womb. The first two …show more content…

While other soldiers were buried after they fell in battle on the ground the gunner in the turret was instead washed out with a hose. “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” vividly puts the idea in the reader’s face that there was no dignity or honor in his death. The irony in the poem is that the gunner was fighting for a grand cause in a massively important conflict yet the man died in a horrible and repulsive way. Ultimately The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner was a poem more about reflection and thought than about answers. It sought to cope with tragedy by talking about it rather than rationalizing

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