Before He Went Back To The Front Analysis

The story takes place during World War I. An Italian nurse meets a wounded American soldier. They fall in love. Due to circumstance, they're separated from each other. The American soldier goes back to America to get a job. The Italian nurse, Luz, stays in Italy to open her own hospital in Pordonone. In the time that they’re apart, the Italian nurse has an affair with an Italian major. Luz writes to the American soldier telling him that their relationship was just a boy and girl love. The nurse never hears from the American soldier again. The American soldier has an affair with a woman while sharing a taxi cab in Chicago. The American soldier contracts gonorrhea. So it is clear that although love and war are major themes in the story, war is the most important theme in the story. Words like armistice, battalion, Arditi, and anaesthetic are war terminologies. War vocabularies are mentioned in every paragraph of the short story. Love refers to …show more content…
The sentence in paragraph three, sentence one, “Before he went back to the front they went into the Duomo and prayed,” tells the reader that it takes place during wartime. Back to the front means that the American soldier is in the front line of the battle where the action takes place. That is a scary place to be for the American soldier. The American soldier would rather be with, his lover, Luz than being in battle. I would also want that too if I were the American soldier. This supports my thesis because the word, “front” is a war terminology in this situation. Another war terminology is the word, “armistice.” An armistice is an agreement between two opposing sides in a war that agrees to stop fighting for a certain time. An armistice is also known as a truce. Armistice found in the fourth paragraph of the first sentence, “Luz wrote him many letters that he never got until after the armistice.” World War I ended with the armistice in