The story in Barker’s novel, Regeneration, centers on many soldiers with various problems in the hospital. One of these soldiers, named Prior, enters the hospital suffering from Mutism. He meets with Dr. Rivers, a psychiatrist, who encourages him to express his war memories so that he can heal; however, Prior proves to be a difficult patient for Dr. Rivers. When Prior regains his voice, he wanders to a pub in Edinburgh where he meets Sarah Lumb, a young munitions worker, and agree to see each other again. When Prior returns to the hospital, Rivers tries hypnosis on Prior to see if it can help him remember the events that led to his mental breakdown. From the hypnosis, Prior is able to remember perfectly how he had to shovel a fellow soldier’s remains after they were killed by a bomb. Because of the simplicity of this memory, Prior becomes very angry and upset. Once Prior is brought in front of the Board, they tell him that he will not return to the war. Prior tells Sarah about the news to which they agree that they are willing to start a relationship. While the novel focuses on war issues, class and gender are also discussed issues. The issues of class and gender are discussed through a discussion between Prior and Dr. Rivers and discussions between Sarah and the other munitions girls. The issues of class in Regeneration are discussed through a discussion that Dr. Rivers and Prior have together. During a therapy session with Prior, Rivers asks Prior how he fit in with his fellow soldiers on the warfront. He responds that "It's perfectly made clear when you arrive that some people are more welcome than others. It helps if you've been to the right school. It helps if you hunt, it helps if your shirts are the right color.” (Barke... ... middle of paper ... ...k in factories far from home. Like Sarah and her fellow munition workers, working outside of their homes has given women freedom. Being able to have their own spending money, Sarah and the other munition workers can do what they wish. Since the war brought freedom for women, they viewed the war as a positive event for them. It is interesting to note that in the film, Sarah is the only woman to have much focus; the other women are only seen with very few lines. Even with some screen time, Sarah is seen as a supporting character to Prior than a main character like the novel. This is most likely due to the main focus being on the war and how it has affected the soldiers who have been on the war front. Since the women of Regeneration have not been on the warfront, the filmmakers may have felt that their experiences were not as influential as the soldier’s experiences.
The violent nature that the soldiers acquired during their tour in Vietnam is one of O'Brien's predominant themes in his novel. By consciously selecting very descriptive details that reveal the drastic change in manner within the men, O'Brien creates within the reader an understanding of the effects of war on its participants. One of the soldiers, "Norman Bowler, otherwise a very gentle person, carried a Thumb. . .The Thumb was dark brown, rubbery to touch. . . It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen"(O'Brien 13). Bowler had been a very good-natured person in civilian life, yet war makes him into a very hard-mannered, emotionally devoid soldier, carrying about a severed finger as a trophy, proud of his kill. The transformation shown through Bowler is an excellent indicator of the psychological and emotional change that most of the soldiers undergo. To bring an innocent young man from sensitive to apathetic, from caring to hateful, requires a great force; the war provides this force. However, frequently are the changes more drastic. A soldier named "Ted Lavender adopted an orphaned puppy. . .Azar strapped it to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and squeezed the firing device"(O'Brien 39). Azar has become demented; to kill a puppy that someone else has adopted is horrible. However, the infliction of violence has become the norm of behavior for these men; the fleeting moment of compassion shown by one man is instantly erased by another, setting order back within the group. O'Brien here shows a hint of sensitivity among the men to set up a startling contrast between the past and the present for these men. The effect produced on the reader by this contrast is one of horror; therefore fulfilling O'Brien's purpose, to convince the reader of war's severely negative effects.
...and the responsibility to be just as patriotic and dedicated as any other. When the war ended and the men returned, women weren’t required for the occupations, and this stirred a yearning in women to be once again sovereign, and perhaps the time set a scene for a path to complete gender integration and a women’s rights movement.
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 ...
... During the Total War, men were sent to war and women were needed therefore women were free and as free citizen must help their nation. As soon as the war was over they were no longer needed and sent back home and continue their unpaid domestic work. As one of the propaganda image showed in class illustrated women who didn’t help during wartime can be prosecuted for murder. How are women free if they can’t make their choice of rather or not to be involved in a war? Where is the freedom of choice? Wood’s book illustrates how women are utilized as both babas and comrade or Mary and Eve with this notion of women emancipation. The government really believes women are primitive and unintellectual since they are playing with their desire and making them their little puppet. In time of war, used them for work and in time of peace used them as babas and subordinate to men.
In “Field Trip”, Kathleen’s childhood innocence leads her to asking her father about why he was so caught up on Vietnam even though he was there twenty years ago. When Kathleen finally tells her father he is weird because, “coming over here. Some dumb thing happens a long time ago and you can’t ever forget it.” she is beginning to make the connection that this war had left scars that will never be removed from the soldiers who fought (O’Brien PAGE). In “Camouflaging the Chimera,” the author writes about how the soldiers sat waiting for the perfect moment as to not get caught by the Viet-Cong and killed. Yusef Komunyakaa finishes this line with “till something almost broke inside us” which shows that the emotional toll on the soldiers was tremendous and could lead to irreversible damage of their minds (Komunyakaa). This long term scarring of the mind that is now called PTSD is recognized by the authors as a part of the fact that the government thought only of winning the war, instead of realizing that they had forced so many men to fight and deal with these problems in the
This autobiography shows us that there are positive and negative aspects of changing, you could either gain from it or be affected detrimentally by it. Sally’s father fought in WW1 and returned with a severe sickness, he stayed in the hospital for a while and his sickness got worse, eventually he passed away, this is shown through the expression of her mother as she “broke down completely” as the two ambulance men took their father away. Their neighbour also spoke to the kids and through the emotive language where she mentioned, “I have bad news for you all”, it was quiet clear that he had passed away. This demonstrates that crossing boundaries and making decisions can sometimes lead to failures and his consequence was death even though he couldn’t chose whether he wanted to fight or not to fight in the war.
During the Civil war, women faced a host of new and different duties and responsibilities. these wartime contributions helped expand many women’s ideas about what their “proper” place should be. Women played many different roles in the Civil War. They did not just sit idly and wait they went and supported the war effort, some as nurses and aids and others took a more upfront approach and secretly enlisted in the army, and served as spies and smugglers. Whatever the duties were these new jobs redefined women traditional roles as mothers, housewives, and they were made an important part of the war
Before the Civil War, women were expected only to create clean, comfortable, and caring environments for their household. But, the Civil war completely changed the American view of a woman's responsibilities. Women took on a new role as soldiers and other key parts in battle. They organised aid relief and created new, innovative ideas on war strategy. Even though they were not respected in the world of war and business at the time, their efforts drastically changed the expectations and acceptance of women in the future.
“PTSD… destroyed the person I was. That carefree, vital man became two men in the wake of injury. One is the person you meet, still duty-bound, whose emotions are identifiable and whose reactions usually seem normal. The other is the man inside me, the one who never really came back, who still lives on the battlefield.”
... dismissing these ideas as the war ended and men returned home. Their focus then turned to assuring the male public that women were still women and downplayed the independence they had gained. Nevertheless, those women paved the way for women after them to enter the work force, showing that even though their work was temporary during a time of crisis, they exceeded the expectations a nation had set for them.
...nd bloodshed. Women gave a reason to go to war, a reason to come back from the war, and oddly, a reason to want to return to the war. The men were in a fraternity of life, and with no women around for so long they began to rely on themselves, and no longer had the needs that were provided them by women. They wanted to play in the jungle with their friends, only this time with no guns. They missed the life that they spent together eating rations and swapping stories. When they went home they were veterans, like the old men of the World Wars. If they stayed, they were still heroes, warriors, and victims. They still loved deeply the women at home, because they had no reason to fight or bicker, or possibly realize that the women they assumed would be waiting for them had changed in that time. The men were torn between love of women, and the love of brotherhood.
Perhaps my expectations were poorly formed, but I found the chapter which dealt with the aftermath of World War II, “War and Peace: Fanning the Home Fires,” to be somewhat uneven. May quite thoroughly lays out the occupational and economic changes for women workers both during and after the war. Her insight on the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAACS) and the Women Appointed for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) is equally pertinent to a discussion of the contribution women made to the war effort. In fact, this treatment in particular could have been expanded to examine some of the very particular non-traditional roles women performed in military service at the time - for example, women serving as test pilots - which truly stretched the boundaries
Remarque uses the contrast between the older generations of soldiers, schoolmasters, and men with higher military rank to convey how the youth at war are more negatively affected. As Barker and Last conclude, “ only the older generation, like Kat, will be able to slip back more or less unscarred into civil life....”(82) Paul argues that the older generation “represented the world of maturity” that was “associated with greater insight and a more humane wisdom.”(Remarque 12-3) However, this ideal in which their elders signified was quickly shattered by the reality of war. Remarque conveys in his book that the older generation had suffered less because the war was a mere “interruption”, the young men, in contrast, “have been gripped by it and do not know what the end maybe. We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a wasteland.” (20)
: When men were out for war, women usually did the work instead. They kept the United States running in supplies and weapons for soldiers. Women gained their will to fight for women’s rights.
This was the start of a new age in the history for women. Before the war a woman’s main job was taking care of her household more like a maid, wife and mother. The men thought that women should not have to work and they should be sheltered and protected. Society also did not like the idea of women working and having positions of power in the workforce but all that change...