Similar to Marlow, Captain Willard experiences a toll on his subconscious. Willard was fascinated by the genius of Colonel Kurtz and pondered on how a man could chose to be placed in the Cambodian jungle despite his extraordinary talents. However, when he meets the colonel he is awestruck by the brutality that Kurtz is able to perform upon the natives. Eventually Willard becomes a prisoner of Colonel Kurtz, but starts to question his initial intentions to assassinate the Colonel. Thus, Willard forms a subtle connection with his capturer becoming fickle minded. The changes in Willard’s persona can be identified in Coppola’s film, through Willard’s inner monologue. Colonel Kurtz has the ability to understand Willard’s subconscious on a deeper …show more content…
Even though Willard’s decision to annihilate Colonel Kurtz should have been unquestionable, doubt arises as Willard appears to become sympathetic to Kurtz, realizing that he is the result of the monstrous affects of war. However, it is Colonel Kurtz’s approval to free a man who’s mission requires his own assassination that allows the phycological damage that the horror imposes to be evident. Thus, the audience is able to determine that Colonel Kurtz is aware of the horror that he has succumb to and wishes to end his own suffering by exploiting Willard. Kurtz is described by author, Louis Greiff as a dedicated man that has lost his morality, while Willard is portrayed as an empty soldier with no regards to his profession. Thus both Colonel Kurtz and Willard appear to be “morally tainted” beings (486). A subtle connection can be perceived by both characters, demonstrating that in war not a single human being is capable of escaping from the atrocities that burden their minds. As a result, intentions that were once for the good of the military and the progression of a nation, become factors of the psychological horror, in which an individual is revered back to their primitive survival
The human mind is a part of the body which current science knows little about. Trigger mechanisms, and other factors within the brain are relatively unknown to current humanity. Therefore, in order to produce a diagnostic on why Billy Pilgrim became “unstuck” in time, the reader of Slaughterhouse Five must come to terms with situations concerning the experiences described in the novel. Billy Pilgrim starts out, chronologically, as a fairly basic infantryman in the United States Army during the last Nazi offensive of the war, also known as the Battle of the Bulge (Vonnegut, 32). That battle resulted in fierce fighting, and also in massacres (such as the one that occurred near Malmedy, France), and the reader may be sure that there were men who became mentally unsound due to the effects of what they experienced there. Pilgrim is taken in by a group of soldiers who have found themselves behind the Nazi lines and are required to travel, by foot, back to friendly lines (Vonnegut, 32).
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.
...d. In the film, Willard remarks that Kurtz is “clear in the mind but mad in the soul” (Coppola). The statement that Kurtz is a “broken man” is continually reinforced. He was first broken from society and later broken from himself. Eventually, Willard kills Kurtz and Kurtz dies as an honorable soldier. However, this does not occur in the novella in which Kurtz naturally dies from malaria.
Willard, on the other hand, is a psychological mess from the beginning of the film. The opening scenes depict him confessing his own mental imbalances as a result of prolonged service in the Vietnam War. While Conrad’s Marlow borders on complacency, Coppola’s Willard behaves erratically and without reason. His fascination with Kurtz is also less profound than in Heart of Darkness. According to literary scholar and cinema aficionado Mark A. Rivera, “In Conrad, Marlow is in awe of Kurtz, comes to identify with him in some dark recess of his own psyche; Willard, on the other hand, is more impressed with Kurtz's credentials than moved by his force of mind and will.”
In “The Penal Colony” the life of the officer is solely based on the old commandant’s rules and ideals. His strong obsession of being “involved in the very first experiments and also [sharing] in the work all the way to it completion” (96) Has a deep impact on the officer’s life and beliefs. The officer is not only obsessed with his work but with the old ways that the old commandant made. Also, the fact that he is the last one in the colony that still follow the old ways means that he is going against the whole society in the colony. The new commandant “uses everything as an excuse to attack the old ways” (105).
An example of this in the movie is when Willard faces his own personality of whether or not to complete his soldierly mission of killing Kurtz or to abort it. If he completes the mission he is still civil, if he does not, the Vietnam jungle has conquered him. The first soldier that is sent to kill Kurtz did not kill Kurtz, but in fact became one of his followers.
In both the film and the movie, Kurtz is portrayed as a man of great stature and mastery whose actions become questioned due his barbaric conduct. While Marlow slowly learns more and more regarding who Kurtz is and what he has done through others’ conversations, Willard educates himself about Kurtz through pictures and files he has of Kurtz. He states that he feels like he already knows a thing or two about Kurtz that are not in the papers he has, and that beyond the bridge, there is only Kurtz. This goes to show how Kurtz develops a prof...
Kurt Vonnegut, a modern American writer, composed stories about fictional situations that occurred in futuristic versions of today’s world. His stories included violence, both upon oneself and one another, and characters who sought out revenge. In “2BR02B” and “Harrison Bergeron”, Vonnegut conveys physical violence most likely experienced while a prisoner of World War 2, as a way to show how war brings pain and destruction.
When reading each page, a sort of investigation begins in trying to figure out how Kurtz became insane. However, that investigation was not fully closed because in the end no one knew what had happened to him. In a way his character presented the idea that perhaps the darkness, his darkness was his own and was all along in him waiting to come out. Because there were other men living and working in the Congo who had not become insane as he did, such as the Russian trader or the ivory company’s accountant.
Kurtz was not always the power hungry man portrayed in Conrad’s book. According to his Intended, Kurtz was an admired man who had a “generous heart” and a “noble mind” (Conrad, 70). However, after his expedition into Africa, he became a changed man; an “insoluble problem” (Conrad, 50). The new Kurtz “[kicks] the very earth to pieces” (Conrad, 61). “Let us say – nerves, [go] wrong, and [causes] him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites” (Conrad, 45). He has dropped all sense and morality and continues to live on according to his various lusts.
Slaughterhouse-Five is a story of Billy Pilgrim 's capture by the Nazi Germans during the last years of World War II. Throughout the narrative, excerpts of Billy’s life are portrayed from his pre-war self to his post-war insanity. Billy is able to move both forward and backwards through his life in a random cycle of events. Living the dull life of a 1950s optometrist in Ilium, New York, he is the lover of a provocative woman on the planet Tralfamadore, and simultaneously an American prisoner of war in Nazi Germany. While I agree with Christopher Lehmann-Haupt that Slaughterhouse-Five effectively combines fact and fiction, I argue that the book is more centralized around coping.
... officer was a “white hat,” in the book they referred to them as newjack. Most of the guards were turnkey; they had little contact with inmates. Lastly, one guard told Ted Conover to live at work the problem at work and not bring it home with him. In class we talked about how officer go home with the problems of the job, which is not healthy for them and their family.
O’Brien’s unique verisimilitude writing style fills the novel with deep meaning and emotion. Analyzing the novel through a psychological lens only adds to its allure. Understanding why characters act the way they do helps bring this novel to life. The reader begins to empathize with the characters. Every day, the soldiers’ lives hang in the balance. How these soldiers react to life-threatening situations will inspire the reader. Life has an expiration date. Reading about people who are held captive by their minds and who die in the name of war, will inspire the reader to live everyday as if they are currently in the
“Slaughterhouse-Five” is an anti-war novel. It describes a flesh-and-blood world. Main character is Billy Pilgrim, he is a time traveler in this book, his first name Billy is from the greatest novelist in the USA in 19 century’s novel “Billy Budd” ; and his last name is from “The Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan. Differently, the main character in “The Pilgrim’s Progress” ’s traveling has meaning and discovering, Billy Pilgrim’s traveling just has violence and escape. In the novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut ’s main character, Billy Pilgrim is sane and his time travel is half in his mind half is real. He is looked so innocent and weakness, there is a sentence which is spoken by Billy Pilgrim “So it goes.” (2) This quotation shows that a poignant sense of helplessness.
The detailed descriptions of the dead man’s body show the terrible costs of the war in a physical aspect. O’Brien’s guilt almost takes on its own rhythm in the repetition of ideas, phrases, and observations about the man’s body. Some of the ideas here, especially the notion of the victim being a “slim, young, dainty man,” help emphasize O’Brien’s fixation on the effects of his action—that he killed someone who was innocent and not meant to be fighting in the war. At the same time, his focus on these physical characteristics, rather than on his own feelings, betrays his attempt to keep some distance in order to dull the pain. The long, unending sentences force the reader to read the deta...