Alive In The Killing Fields Literary Analysis

Improved Essays
In the non-fictional story Alive in the Killing Fields, Nawuth Keat, who is a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia tells his story. The author conveys the fact that the citizens of Cambodia faced hardships and this actually happened to them. The Khmer Rouge was the name given to the followers of the Communist Party based in Kampuchea, Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge did all kinds of harsh things such as home invasions, tortured many innocent citizens for fun, and even killing citizens without warning. The Khmer Rouge was pretty brutal and Nawuth Keat shows that to his audience in this story. “ I do not know if Zhen encouraged the Khmer Rouge to target my family on

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Courage Nelson Mandela once stated that, “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it”. In Ernst Gaines’ novel, “A Lesson Before Dying”, the most important lesson to learn before dying is courage. The novel shows this through the characters Tante Lou, Miss. Emma, and Jefferson. First of all, Tante Lou shows courage by being with Miss. Emma, working hard to get Grant through university, and she believes God will help everything.…

    • 1060 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    The Man He Killed deals with the uselessness, or pointlessness, of war. It dramatizes a battle scene between two men. It is told from the point of view of an ordinary working-class soldier, who is reflecting on the idea that the man he killed in battle probably had a lot in common with him. He deals with an internal struggle as his thoughts are regretful before he even shoots. The narrator ponders that , he would have befriended the combatant.…

    • 181 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The novel Dead to You written by Lisa Mcmann is a gripping mystery about a boy named Ethan De Wilde, who was kidnapped from his home nine years ago. Now he has returned home and reunited with his family. Ethan is now in his teenage years, his life back home is a struggle, as he vaguely remembers his past. An outrageous twist lingers through the air, that leaves the characters and the reader stunned. Ethan has returned home, settling back to normality is difficult as his brother, Blake targets Ethan, trying to cause conflict between them.…

    • 574 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Fantasies are like landscapes with no real ending and a place where desires can run freely but at the cost of one´s own mind. The Fantasies inside ¨Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been¨ show Connie´s freedom to an extent, in which her own knowledge and persona become her crutch in the aftermath of her conflict. But, however, In ¨Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” Joyce Oates uses Connie struggle against Arnold to portray her fear of adulthood as well as symbolize her innocence being tarnished, which resulted her in maturing. Foremost, the conflict begins with Connie trying to become, visually, a woman so that she can attract the attention of young men at the hangouts.…

    • 1215 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The power of story truth and happening truth in the life of Tim O’Brien The author Tim O’Brien finds the way to tell his Vietnam War experience in his book by giving the story-truth and not happening-truth. The story-truth that never happened to him shows how he felt inside during the fighting for his life. The happening-truth seems to him not as interesting as the fiction that he tells in the story “The Things They Carried.” The story-truth is the better way to share human experience, and it is demonstrated the work by Tim O'Brien.…

    • 880 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Many children at the age of twelve do not encounter the horrors of war. For Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier, the horrors of war became a reality at this young age. In his memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs Of A Boy Soldier, Ishmael does everything he can to escape the sadness of old experiences that bloodshed has brought to him. The memories of violence and loss that plague Ishmael's mind burden him with pain throughout his journey. Ishmael has very few ways he can cope with memories and exposure of warfare.…

    • 633 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Throughout reading The Things They Carried, my understanding of particular literary theories has vastly increased. The main lenses in which my group used to interpret the novel was feminist, psychoanalytical, and postmodernism. During the first block, it was more difficult to determine which lens to look through, and a lot of thought had to be put in when reading the block as a whole. But, as the book progressed, I began to pick up on particular instances and immediately recognized which literary lens it belonged to. Therefore, during our groups reading of the block as a whole, it was much easier to read it through a specific lens.…

    • 1188 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. -Atul Gawande. A Reaction Paper. By - Malay Parekh Q1. Atul Gawande talks about various culture and the difference in their approach towards the elderly.…

    • 1336 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Cambodian Genocide The Cambodian genocide lasted from 1975-1979 and killed “approximately 1.7 million people” (Kiernan). The Cambodian genocide was run by the “Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot combined extremist ideology with ethnic animosity and a diabolical disregard for human life to produce repression, misery, and murder on a massive scale“ (Kiernan). The Khmer Rouge’s goal during this genocide was to fix society by limiting religions and races. During the genocide “Certain minority groups were singled out for persecution and even extermination” (ABC-CLIO).…

    • 524 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Eric Tang’s “Unsettled”, shows that Cambodian refugees being treated unfairly and put in the hyper ghetto is an important literature that shows that the resettlement in the camps was not the solution for a better living standard. This is the denial of human rights against Cambodians in the US or is not that different from the Khmer Rouge. In this paper, I will argue about there are not that much difference in treatment inside the settlement camp and the Khmer Rouge. First, the reason that Cambodians came to the US is protection.…

    • 735 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Miss Brill’s Fantasy vs. Reality In Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Miss Brill” (rpt. In Greg Johnson and Thomas R. Arp. Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, 12th ed. [Boston: Wadsworth, 2015] 155-158), the protagonist, Miss Brill, lives a very lonesome life.…

    • 561 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    One of the outcomes of the Civil War was the emancipation of African Americans. After the Thirteenth Amendment passed in 1869, resulting in the abolition of slavery, millions of African Americans were able to experiment freedom for the first time. As part of the Reconstruction phase after the war, several amendments and acts were passed to prevent discrimination at the new group that was incorporating to society as an “equal”. They were even granted the right to vote, given by the Fifteenth Amendment, which clearly stated that it was prohibited to deny a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen 's race, color, or previous condition of servitude. However, in reality, that equality was almost impossible to achieve.…

    • 823 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    (Krkljes, 2015) are where Pol Pot and his authoritarian government committed a mass murder. The Khmer Rouge knew that knowledge is power, which is why they mainly focused on “exterminating” the “educated.” There were nearly “2 million Cambodians” murdered on these killing fields. (Center) Cambodia today is still working to fully recover from the loss of those millions of lives. They are in the midst of an enduring…

    • 1228 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Jon Krakauer’s “Death of an Innocent” appeared on the Independent’s website on 11 April 1993. Krakauer, an American writer and mountaineer, mainly known for his works about the outdoors, especially mountain climbing has produces yet another amazing news article among numerous others. This specific news article in fact have been the highlight of his writing career as it paved him to write his best-selling non-fiction books—Into the Wild. After reading “Death of an Innocent” by Krakauer, I have found myself left wondering of the perpetual psyche of Chris McCandless throughout his extreme odysseys. During my reading, I sense that Chris was not an ordinary person who lived according to the preprogrammed dogma of the society.…

    • 1029 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    We have all been trapped at one point or another in our lives. Whether it is emotionally, physically or mentally trapped, we have all been there. Within the novel Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, we find quite a few people, or should I say clones, who are trapped, but do not realize they are. The clones within this novel are not fairly treated nor do they even have a chance at their own lives. They are just a part of one big experiment that humans are testing out, but even along the way they are put up to the test if they have a soul or not, to see if they could live out their own lives.…

    • 1527 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays