Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” exposes the grim nightmares and wastes of war, and the bitter resentment towards the exposure and experience of combat that transgresses the death of a soldier’s innocence. The title distinctly acknowledges a collective group versus a single gunner to emphasize the universal remorse, and creates a stark scene of war and death. Despite the blunt scene, the reader is left with a surreal location and time reiterating the focus of an extensive setting, further representing the unending message that death has no specific time or place. The speaker immediately evokes compassion through alliteration by creating an image of a youthful adolescence in, “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State” (1). The connotation in mother metaphorically functions as a symbol of the creator of life and induces an image of innocence in the speaker. The protective and loving emotions of paternal imagery blindly drop into a harsh involuntary instrument of the military, emphasizing the finality of childhood and innocence in the accentuation of an end-stop. The capitalization of the “State” highlights the allegorical …show more content…
As the speaker awakens the form of the poem transitions into an intense state of metrical disorder in, “Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, / I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters” (3-4). The illusion of tranquility in dreams and sky imagery become free of life when the internal rhyme becomes harsh and mechanically repeats in “black flak” to mimic the sound of machine warfare penetrating peace. The contradicting shifts between life and death ironically represent the speaker’s awakening as a nightmare reality of immediate death and life as imaginary and
Randall Jarret stakes his claim in “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by using imagery which concurrently expresses the literal horror of death as a World War Two gunner and a metaphorical representation of the death of an aborted child. By connecting the disparate themes with dual imagery, he creates an impact greater than either standing on its own.
The powerful poem ‘Weapons Training’ showcases a sergeant, through malicious words, guiding his troops. However it is through ‘Homecoming’, where Dawe exposes the brutal hopelessness brought forth by the futility of war. Therefore it can be seen that war has an emotional toll on both families and the soldiers. Both poems have a recurring message that all war does is bring loss, death and mourning, showcasing Dawes strong opinions about a futile
In the aftermath of a comparatively minor misfortune, all parties concerned seem to be eager to direct the blame to someone or something else. It seems so easy to pin down one specific mistake that caused everything else to go wrong in an everyday situation. However, war is a vastly different story. War is ambiguous, an enormous and intangible event, and it cannot simply be blamed for the resulting deaths for which it is indirectly responsible. Tim O’Brien’s story, “In the Field,” illustrates whom the soldiers turn to with the massive burden of responsibility for a tragedy. The horrible circumstances of war transform all involved and tinge them with an absurd feeling of personal responsibility as they struggle to cope.
Through these brutal and traumatic scenes, the novel presents several themes, one of which is “Loss of Youth.” These young soldiers endure a lot, pai...
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.
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque displays unsettling images and symbols of war as it follows Paul Baumer, a young soldier, during World War I. The constant bombardments and escaped shells of war cause the soldier to sink into a barbaric mindset of war. By using imagery and symbols to show how soldiers sink into the mindset of war the author creates a vivid picture of the many horrors of war and its mentality.
In the excerpt “The War Escalates” by Paul Boyer, the author clearly shows how war influences the self by utilizing the descriptive literary devices tone and mood. Throughout the excerpt, Boyer informs the audience on the situation of the Vietnamese war. Boyer mentions the experience of a nurse who worked in the military aiding injured soldiers. Using the voice of the nurse, Boyer includes her experience, “‘We really saw the worse of it, because the nurses never saw any of the victories. If the Army took a hill, we saw what was left over. I remember one boy who was brought in missing two legs and an arm, and his eyes were bandaged. A general came in later and pinned a Purple Heart on the boy’s hospital gown, and the horror of it all was so amazing that it just took my breath away. You thought, was this supposed to be an even trade?’” (Boyer 2). The author expresses his tone by adding the memoir of the nurse. The nurses of the Vietnam War suffered after effects of the sights of war. This particular memoir exhibits the change in the nurse’s mentality after having to watch the horrors of injured people and deaths. The post-war devastations negatively affected ...
From sunrise to sunset, day after day, war demolishes men, cities, and hope. War has an effect on soldiers like nothing else, and sticks with them for life. The damage to a generation of men on both sides of the war was inestimable. Both the novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, and the poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” by Alan Seeger, demonstrate the theme of a lost generation of men, mentally and physically, in war through diction, repetition, and personification.
The two classic war novels ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ by Erich Maria Remarque and ‘Catch 22’ by Joseph Heller both provide a graphic insight into the life of soldiers serving their country in the historic world wars. One distinct theme of interest found in both books, is the way in which war has physically and mentally re-shaped the characters. Remarque creates the character Paul Baümer, a young soldier who exposes anxiety and PTSD (commonly known as Shellshock) through his accounts of WW1’s German army. ‘Catch 22’ however, is written in the third person and omnisciently explores insanity and bureaucracy in an American Bombardier Squadron through its utter lack of logic. The two novels use their structure, characters, symbolism and setting to make a spectacle of the way war re-shapes the soldiers.
It is apparent that the topic of war is difficult to discuss among active duty soldiers and civilians. Often times, citizens are unable to understand the mental, physical, and physiological burden service members experience. In Phil Klay’s Ten Kliks South, the narrator struggles to cope with the idea that his artillery team has killed enemy forces. In the early stages of the story, the narrator is clearly confused. He understands that he did his part in firing off the artillery rounds, yet he cannot admit to killing the opposition. In order to suppress his guilt and uncertainty, our narrator searches for guidance and reassurance of his actions. He meets with an old gunnery sergeant and during their conversation, our narrator’s innocence
World War One or “The War To End All Wars” was one of the most devastating events in the history of humankind. When looking back at such a gruesome war it is understandable that we might dwell on the key battles and tactics, which are often summarized by statistics on death tolls. However, we often forget that statistics create an illusion that warps our perception of death. As Stalin put it “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is just a statistic”. In the novel “The Wars” by Timothy Findley, the author draws away from traditional war stories by showing a true appreciation for life that truly touches the reader on a human and emotional level. Timothy Findley narrows in something anyone can relate to: a loving mother worried about her son risking his life in a war. This mother in the “The Wars” is Mrs. Ross, who represents the home front while her son, Robert Ross, fights for the British in World War One. As the book progresses and Robert gets further into the death trap known as the “Great War”, Mrs. Ross becomes increasingly obsessive and connected to her son as his fate becomes more clear.
The poem comprises three stanzas which are patterned in two halves; the rule of three is ingeniously used throughout the poem to create tension and show the progression of the soldiers’ lives. There is a variety of rhyming schemes used – possibly Duffy considered using caesural rhyme, internal rhyme and irregular rhyme to better address the elegiac reality. The rhythm is very powerful and shows Duffy’s technical adroitness. It is slightly disconcerting, and adds to the other worldly ambience of the poem. Duffy uses a powerful comparative in each stanza to exemplify the monstrosity and extent of war, which is much worse than we imagine; it develops throughout each stanza, starting with a syntactical ‘No; worse.’ to ‘worse by far’ and ending on ‘much worse’. Similarly, the verbs used to describe the soldier’s shadow as he falls shows the reader the journey of the shadow, as if it’s the trajectory of soldiers’ lives. At first, the shadow is as an act...
The young soldiers depicted in Erich Maria Remarque's text All Quiet on the Western Front represent a generation without precedent, constancy, or forethought. The men, answering their elders' calls to become national heroes, have lost their innocence on the battlefield and remain forever altered in belief and spirit. Remarque contrasts the cold realities of war in the present to the tranquility of the past in order to illustrate the psychological transformation of the men stationed on the frontlines. The soldiers appear trapped in the present and alienated from their pasts; however, deconstruction of the text rejects the present and past as opposing states of time and identity, and reveals them as related conditions that are intimately and permanently intertwined.
One of the worst things about war is the severity of carnage that it bestows upon mankind. Men are killed by the millions in the worst ways imaginable. Bodies are blown apart, limbs are cracked and torn and flesh is melted away from the bone. Dying eyes watch as internal organs are spilled of empty cavities, naked torso are hung in trees and men are forced to run on stumps when their feet are blown off. Along with the horrific deaths that accompany war, the injuries often outnumber dead men. As Paul Baumer witnessed in the hospital, the injuries were terrifying and often led to death. His turmoil is expressed in the lines, “Day after day goes by with pain and fear, groans and death gurgles. Even the death room I no use anymore; it is too small.” The men who make it through the war take with them mental and physical scarification from their experiences.
War can destroy a man both in body and mind for the rest of his life. In “The Sniper,” Liam O’Flaherty suggests the horror of war not only by presenting its physical dangers, but also by showing its psychological effects. We are left to wonder which has the longer lasting effect—the visible physical scars or the ones on the inside?