The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder Pieter Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death depicts a hell on earth scenario that many would find difficult to look at. Believed to have been painted around 1592 (Woodward, 2009), Bruegel’s brush strokes illustrate peasants and nobles alike being tortured or killed by an army of skeletons. However the greater detail of this oil on panel painting lays out much of what is considered on one hand a parody of life and on the other an ominous reminder that death and war is inevitable and indiscriminate of social class. Although The Triumph of Death was painted late in Bruegel’s artistic career it’s documented that he was registered in 1551 as a master with the Guild of Saint Luke, a prominent art guild founded by Pieter Coecke van Aelst in Antwerp, who is also believed to have been the artist Bruegel apprenticed under (Emile & Charles, p. 62). The work itself depicts …show more content…
The chaos that Bruegel illustrates only shows us that humanity’s fixation with preparing for death only makes us victims of it, and although it’s only a small portion of the painting, it’s possible to enjoy life without becoming burdened by preparing for the inevitable. The most important statement Bruegel makes is that life and death is indiscriminate, that regardless of social status or religious denomination, the concept of death is not foreign or avoidable. Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death blends a chaotic landscape of war and seeming Armageddon with a powerful message about the benefits of leading a life without worry and the downfall of those who dwell upon the notion that death is something we can prepare for. Although the scenery is grim and the skeleton army is throughout the landscape, the contrast of those closest to the viewer perspective and those in the distance beating back the army also shows that it is possible to beat the concept of
In the history of modern western civilization, there have been few incidents of war, famine, and other calamities that severely affected the modern European society. The First World War was one such incident which served as a reflection of modern European society in its industrial age, altering mankind’s perception of war into catastrophic levels of carnage and violence. As a transition to modern warfare, the experiences of the Great War were entirely new and unfamiliar. In this anomalous environment, a range of first hand accounts have emerged, detailing the events and experiences of the authors. For instance, both the works of Ernst Junger and Erich Maria Remarque emphasize the frightening and inhumane nature of war to some degree – more explicit in Jünger’s than in Remarque’s – but the sense of glorification, heroism, and nationalism in Jünger’s The Storm of Steel is absent in Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Instead, they are replaced by psychological damage caused by the war – the internalization of loss and pain, coupled with a sense of helplessness and disconnectedness with the past and the future. As such, the accounts of Jünger and Remarque reveal the similar experiences of extreme violence and danger of World War I shared by soldiers but draw from their experiences differing ideologies and perception of war.
It is inevitable when dealing regularly with a subject as brutal as war, that death will occur. Death brings grief for the victim’s loved ones, which William Faulkner depicts accurately and fairly in many of his works, including the short story “Shall Not Perish” and The Unvanquished. While the works differ because of the time (The Unvanquished deals with the Civil War while “Shall Not Perish” takes place during World War II) and the loved ones grieving (The Unvanquished shows the grief of a lover and “Shall Not Perish” shows the grief of families), the pain they all feel is the same.
After an event of large magnitude, it still began to take its toll on the protagonist as they often “carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die” during the war (O’Brien 1187). The travesties that occurred with the brutality of war did not subside and began to affect those involved in a deeply emotional way. The multitude of disastrous happenings influenced the narrator to develop a psychological handicap to death by being “afraid of dying” although being “even more afraid to show it” (O’Brien 1187). The burden caused by the war creates fear inside the protagonist’s mind, yet if he were to display his sense of distress it would cause a deeper fear for those around him, thus making the thought of exposing the fear even more frightening. The emotional battle taking place in the psyche of the narrator is directly repressed by the war.
The Work of Death seemed inevitable to soldiers who embarked on the journey known as the Civil War. Throughout the Civil War, human beings learned how to prepare for death, imagine it, risk it, endure it, and seek to understand it. All the soldiers needed to be willing to die and needed to turn to the resources of their culture, codes of masculinity, patriotism, and religion to prepare themselves for the war ahead of them. Death individually touched soldiers with it’s presence and the fear of it, as death touched the soldiers it gave them a sense of who they really are and how they could change on their death bed.
No other epidemic reaches the level of the Black Death which took place from 1348 to 1350. The epidemic, better regarded as a pandemic, shook Europe, Asia, and North Africa; therefore it deems as the one of the most devastating events in world history. In The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350, John Aberth, compiles primary sources in order to examine the origins and outcomes of this deadly disease. The author, a history professor and associate academic dean at Vermont’s Castleton State College, specializes in medieval history and the Black Death. He wrote the book in order to provide multiple perspectives of the plague’s impact. Primarily, pathogens started the whole phenomenon; however, geological, economic, and social conditions
... horrors of war such as, his parents who still view war as glamorous and idealistic. War takes a heavy toll on soldiers who fight in it and in these dangerous moments anybody would have gone insane. It takes a very special type of soldier to be able to handle both the psychological and physical challenges that a soldier has to face in everyday battle. A soldier such as this must be capable of handling the sight of a mutilated comrade and not immediately chatter to pieces. The author conveys this message in his extreme use of words with negative connotation such as shells, typhus, dysentery, and trenches. In this portion of the novel a great deal of emphasis is placed on the word death which is repeated several times and standing on its own it holds a great deal of negative connotations. Therefore, due to the severity of the situation and the extensive use of words with negative connotations the overall tone of the novel appeared to be very depressing or serious. This selection also demonstrates just how mythical the character of war that many individuals who have not experienced the tragedy of battle believe to be true by illustrating just how appalling and grim war is in reality.
Thomas Nagel’s paper Death would be better if renamed “Why Death is Bad” because that is the issue he is dealing with throughout it. He is not raising a general view on what death is but rather to establish a specific point about death; that it is bad. He raises the question on how we should regard death and whether “it is a bad thing to die.” Nagel is building a case for saying that death is bad, that death is an evil and that when someone dies something bad happens to them. What Nagel is trying to establish is the reputation of Epicurus who said that death is neither good nor bad because since death is not something we experience, and death is the taking away of all experience; the ability to experience, it is nothing to us, neither good nor bad. What Nagel wants to establish it that Epicurus didn’t have it right. Nagel wants to restore our common sense or natural view that death is an evil.
“Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but
With exaggeration, authors craft their writing to have an even greater, more impactful effect on their audiences. This enhanced effect found in Candide serves the purpose of highlighting how humans adopt a type of absolute viciousness and inhumanity in times of war. One example is the instance where Candide - a member of the Bulgar army, at the time - must choose between being “flogged” by the entirety of the military command, or to endure “twelve bullets in his brain” (24). Here, Candide is given a nonsensical, almost ludicrous, ultimatum. Voltaire offers an embellished example that serves to demonstrate the barbaric military practices that come with war. Being a recurring aspect of war, Candide is, essentially, forced to choose between death and death. In fact, along with exaggeration, Voltaire satirizes war even further as the choice of whether it be a gradual or speedy demise is Candide’s own luxury. Voltaire does not just simply antagonize the ramifications of war, but rather, he ridicules all facets of war. Another example within Candide is when the Old Woman reveals the story of her own life as proof of the grim hardship that she too has experienced. In the midst of another battle, “one buttock” was cut off of the live bodies of every woman present in the interest of feeding the starving soldiers (56).
War as seen through the eyes of Ambrose Bierce in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge depicts it as truly gritty. The author successfully sends a message of how death is a part of war, and it is not as noble or glorious as one would think it is. Due to popular media, we have this attitude that the protagonist is going to go down in a blaze of glory, and while it may be true for some, it is not like that for everyone. War is rough, dark, and gritty but no one ever wants to talk about those parts of war because it would ruin the fantasy of it.
...eave one with a similar "air of tragedy". However, if we can gather the strength to adopt an authentic way of being, if we can see that we have a self to find and overcome the repression for selfhood, we can at the very least be freed from the mistaken view of death and thus, be freed from the irrational fear that normally accompanies it. The role of mortality in Heidegger's philosophy may be methodological and catalytic, but the import of mortality to Human Being, whether authentic or inauthentic is and always has been significant in conjunction with our cultural overlays and traditions. Heidegger's phenomenological view of death as a way-of-being is significant to us because it provides a workable alternative to the common dogmatic views of death and it can help to guide us through a profound existence, that is laden with the traps and pitfalls of inauthenticity.
Death is a great wave whose shadow falls upon the lives of all beings below Olympus. Amidst this shadow and its immediacy in war, humans must struggle to combat and metaphysically transcend their transitory natures. If they fail to forge a sense of meaning for themselves and their people in what often seems an inexorably barren world, they are lef...
The concept of human mortality and how it is dealt with is dependent upon one’s society or culture. For it is the society that has great impact on the individual’s beliefs. Hence, it is also possible for other cultures to influence the people of a different culture on such comprehensions. The primary and traditional way men and women have made dying a less depressing and disturbing idea is though religion. Various religions offer the comforting conception of death as a begining for another life or perhaps a continuation for the former.
In the play “everyman” death is depicted as something that is terribly feared as no one seemed ready for it, death is perceived as something that takes one away from the pleasures of this world.
Intro : Introduce the concept of death, and how the concept of death is shown to be something to be feared