The Experience Of War Many authors have written about war themes, some extracts of the stories and poems that I have read and researched are The Upturned Face by Steven Crane .It is about a fictional war being fought in an imaginary Europe. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell describes his senses and feeling of getting shot in the neck during battle. Exposure by Wilfred Owen,describes the horrors and reality of being in the trenches of the First World War. And The Making of Me by Robert Westall is about a shell-shocked grandfather who has the responsibility of looking after his grandchild. In the Upturned Face by Steven Crane, a fictional war is fought in an imagined Europe. This extract describes the stresses of battle and its effects on the relationships between comrades at arms. In the extract Crane depicts the scene of a dead comrade: "The first button brick-red with drying blood, and he did not seem to dare touch it." He successfully captures the scene of battle describing the scenery and sounds of battle. Crane uses sentences such as "Bullets cracked near their ears" this depicts how close they were to being shot or killed. He uses tension in the writing to depict what it would be like "He burst out in a sudden strange fury at the two privates." In Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, he describes being shot in the neck in a descriptive but to the point kind of way. Orwell describes the experience simply and directly, "It was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion", he uses these types of sentences to create a depicted image and feeling of what it is like to be shot in the neck. "With it a sense of utter weakness a feeling of being stricken up to nothing" he uses powerful ... ... middle of paper ... ...ing soldiers tangled on the barbed wire in no-mans land. Having read about war, watched films on the subject and having seen war photographs, I think that it is important to find out about war from all of these different extracts. Poems like Wilfred Owen's Exposure give you the experiences of the horror of trench warfare. I watched the series called Band of Brothers, which gave good visual examples of the terror, hardship and awful loss of life in the Second World War. I think it is important to read about war, because war is a terrible thing. People on the front line have to endure terrible conditions. They watch many of their friends killed or injured. They often have to live with the effects that war has on the personalities long after the war is over, like in In The Making Of Me. People left at home also suffer in a war when they lose loved ones.
Demolished cities, torn families and decimated countries are a few of the destructive properties of war. Throughout history, the world has been through war after war, never ceasing. Two of the greatest and most destructive wars were World War I and World War II. These wars involved most of the world’s countries and ended with tragic results. The wars also left many soldiers with various mental and physical problems that ruined their social lives. John F. Kennedy once said that “Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.” For the most part, he is right; if war does not end, it will end humankind. The main problem with this is that most people barely even know how destructive war can be; people believe war is the only way to solve problems with other countries. The problem with that is that war often uncovers or starts new problems that can affect others more than the past problems. Literature has helped people grasp at the understanding of what happens during wars and the problems that it can create. Some go into deep aspects of significant wars while others go into wars that everyone fights within themselves. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Beowulf and John Milton’s Paradise Lost are a few pieces of the thousands of works of literatures that capture the tragic, destructive power of war, global and small.
This psychological memoir is written from the eyes of Ishmael Beah and it describes his life through the war and through his recovery. War is one of the most horrific things that could ever happen to anyone. Unwilling young boy soldiers, innocent mothers and children are all affected. In most instances, the media or government does not show the horrific parts of war, instead they focus on the good things that happen to make the people happy and not cause political issues. In his book A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah dispels the romanticism around war through the loss of childhood innocence, the long road of emotional recovery and the mental and physical effects of war.
For young people, the Vietnam War is a thing of the past and they can
World War I, also known as the Great War, lasted from the summer of 1914 until the late fall of 1918. The war was fought between the Allies, which consisted mainly of the United Kingdom, France, and the Russian Empire, and the Central Powers, which consisted mainly of the German Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria (Alliances - Entente and Central Powers). In total, it is estimated that twelve million civilians and nine million combatants died during this horrific and devastating war (DeGroot 1). When the war first began in 1914, many people thought that it would be a war of movement that would quickly be over. However, that changed when the Germans, who were trying to reach and capture the city of Paris in France, were forced to retreat during the Battle of the Marne in September 1914 (Ellis 10). German General von Falkenhayn, who felt that his troops must at all cost hold onto the parts of France and Belgium that they had overtaken, ordered his men to dig in and form defensive trench lines (Ellis 10). The Allies could not break through the enemies lines and were forced to create trenches of their own (Ellis 10). This was only the beginning of trench warfare. A war of movement had quickly come to a standstill on the Western Front. A massive trench line, 475 miles long, quickly spread and extended from the North Sea to the Swiss Frontier (Ellis 10). With neither side budging, soldiers were forced to live in the most miserable of conditions. Simply put, life in the trenches was a living hell. A lieutenant of the 2nd Scottish rifles wrote, “No one who was not there can fully appreciate the excruciating agonies and misery through which the men had to go [through] in those da...
Children exposed to violence within their communities are left with emotions of hopelessness, insecurity, and doubt. Historical events such as the war on terrorism, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the tragic events of September 11th have had a detrimental effect on the entire nation, including the children. Although every child is not directly affected by the effects of war, it somehow has an emotional effect on all. The involvement of a nation in war affects every individual differently, whether it is out of fear, anger, doubt, hope, or love. In the short novel A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, he narrates the story by telling his own involvement in the Civil War in Sierra Leone as a young boy and the many issues he faces while living in horror.
...as they dread wound and death. They have nothing to look forward to but years of rage. They have experienced the horrors of war but have not experienced the enjoyments of life. They will be pushed aside and forgotten and the years will pass, and in the end they will fall into ruin.
There you stand over the body of a fallen friend, a brother or sister in arms. You are asking yourself why them, why not you? What could have I done to save them? That is when you wake up, sweating, panting. It was just a night terror, yet it feels the same as the day they died, even though it has been ten years. This is just one of the many emotional scars soldiers of war face. Though why do we go to war when this is the cost? For many it is because they are unaware of the psychological cost of war, they are only aware of the monetary cost. Tim O 'Brien addresses the true cost of war in The Things They Carried. O 'Brien suggests that psychological trauma caused by war impedes daily life in young Americans drafted into the Vietnam war. He does
Warfare has always been experienced differently by men and women. In many cases, men are in the frontline and face different conditions as compared to women who are on the home front. World War I is one of the most discussed wars that the world has experienced so far. The sheer extent to which the war affected people in different countries around the different continents around the world is appalling. The structure of the society was shaken by World War I. People no longer lived according to the norms they had known before. Both men and women had to adjust in order to fit the societal experience brought about by the war. Though suffering was experienced by both men and women despite where they were during the war, their experiences were completely different thus making it important to look at these experiences from a deeper perspective.
Review of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, written by the talented author Chris Hedges, gives us provoking thoughts that are somewhat painful to read, but at the same time are quite personal confessions. Chris Hedges, a talented journalist to say the least, brings nearly 15 years of being a foreign correspondent to this book and concludes how all of his world experiences tie together. Throughout his book, he unifies themes present in all the wars he experienced first hand. The most important themes I was able to draw from this book were, war skews reality, dominates culture, seduces society with its heroic attributes, distorts memory, and supports a cause, and allures us by a constant battle between death and love.
Going to War The arrival of winter is well on its way. Colorful leaves had turned to brown and fallen from the branches of the trees. The sky opened to a new brightness with the disappearance of the leaves. As John drove down the country road, he was much more aware of all his surroundings.
War always seems to have no end. A war between countries can cross the world, whether it is considered a world war or not. No one can be saved from the reaches of a violent war, not even those locked in a safe haven. War looms over all who recognize it. For some, knowing the war will be their future provides a reason for living, but for others the war represents the snatching of their lives without their consent. Every reaction to war in A Separate Peace is different, as in life. In the novel, about boys coming of age during World War II, John Knowles uses character development, negative diction, and setting to argue that war forever changes the way we see the world and forces us to mature rapidly.
War is the epitome of cruelty and violence, an experience that can prove maddening and strip away some of the most intrinsic characteristics of humanity. Kurt Vonnegut’s experiences as a prisoner of war during World War II inspired his critically hailed novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), in which characters continually search for meaning in the aftermath of mankind’s irrational cruelty ("Kurt Vonnegut: 1922-2007" 287). Both the main character, Billy Pilgrim, and Vonnegut have been in Dresden for the firebombing, and that is what motivates their narrative (Klinkowitz 335). In his anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut expresses the adverse emotional effects of war through the psyche of Billy Pilgrim.
The film Tomorrow When the War Began is a film based on the novel of the same title. John Marsden’s Tomorrow When the War Began is the story of seven teenagers who return from a camping trip to find their home town has been invaded. The producer of the film has excluded several settings from the book and also changed parts of the plot and the character’s characteristics. These differences occur to show the character’s development, to limit the duration of the film and to keep the audience engaged.
The war destroyed and put an end man's life. It destroyed people in physical and even the emotional. These soldiers with major injuries will hold them all back from what they love to do most and what they w...
The quote shows that when the war is done, the men "will be making homes" (line 6). This shows irony as the war is just beginning however, the authorities are already discussing the events when the war finishes. This is to distract society from the dying soldiers and show them what they will win: new homes.