Unusual measures to solve conflict are often used in war: give examples here. But, what happens when the measures become radical? When a party is desperate to solve a political disagreement or win a war, their measures are often expedient and short sighted. As a result, innocent civilians become vulnerable to the horrors of warfare. Total destruction becomes imminent not only in the infrastructure of a population, but also in the civilization itself. In “After The Sirens,” Hugh Hood uses diction, syntactical elements, and irony to develop the theme that radical measures used to solve conflict often lead to unintended consequences.
Diction, an author’s choice of words, expresses the true reality of a nuclear attack. The use of imagery and …show more content…
The run-on form and multiple clauses suggest such high levels of intensity that the characters’ thoughts are fractured and fragmented. Everything happens at once with no break between events. The spread of the bomb’s effects are so rapid that one must hurry from one thought to the next before it’s over. This climactic moment marks a drastic turning point in the family’s lifestyle. Transition One example of the changed lifestyle includes adapting to life without possessions owned before the sirens. Hood uses parallelism to emphasize all that was lost as a result of the atomic bomb. When the man was lying helplessly amongst the destructions, he remembers “his books, his checkbook, his phonograph records, his wife’s household appliances” and how the quality of life that these material goods gave him is gone. The destruction in the story took many forms, and quality of life was one of them. The repetition of “his” before each noun indicates how his goods, the things he worked hard for, are unjustly destroyed and he must suffer because of something his government has done to provoke such radical solution as a nuclear attack. All these possessions couldn’t have changed the course of the war, so there really was no point in destroying them. The father’s loss was simply an unintended consequence of the atomic
Diction, an author’s choice of words, expresses the true reality of a nuclear attack. The use of imagery and …show more content…
The run-on form and multiple clauses suggest such high levels of intensity that the characters’ thoughts are fractured and fragmented. Everything happens at once with no break between events. The spread of the bomb’s effects are so rapid that one must hurry from one thought to the next before it’s over. This climactic moment marks a drastic turning point in the family’s lifestyle. Transition One example of the changed lifestyle includes adapting to life without possessions owned before the sirens. Hood uses parallelism to emphasize all that was lost as a result of the atomic bomb. When the man was lying helplessly amongst the destructions, he remembers “his books, his checkbook, his phonograph records, his wife’s household appliances” and how the quality of life that these material goods gave him is gone. The destruction in the story took many forms, and quality of life was one of them. The repetition of “his” before each noun indicates how his goods, the things he worked hard for, are unjustly destroyed and he must suffer because of something his government has done to provoke such radical solution as a nuclear attack. All these possessions couldn’t have changed the course of the war, so there really was no point in destroying them. The father’s loss was simply an unintended consequence of the atomic