Irony In The Yellow Birds

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable”. Kevin Powers, the author of The yellow birds was 17 when he enlisted in the war, and Powers was a machine gunner as well. There was 20,000,000 casualties in the Great War, and Wilfred Owen, the author of “Dulce et Decorum Est” was 25 when he died just one week before the war ended. Also Tim O’Brien, author of The things they carried was drafted into the Vietnam war which had 58,000 American deaths, and 2,000,000 Vietnamese deaths. In these documents, writers use imagery, irony, and structure to protest war. Throughout the documents, in the yellow birds by Kevin Powers, and “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen, imagery is used to protest war. In the yellow birds, Powers states “killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them… felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul. This demonstrates what it is like to kill someone and puts a picture in the readers head. This quote gives the reader an …show more content…
In this document, O’Brien uses enumeration and parallel structure to protest war. O’Brien’s use of enumeration shows the stress of all the things they had to carry with them, and protests to show how difficult war really is. Throughout the document, parallel structure is used like cause and effect but O’Briens tone throughout the whole document is plain and monotone. Cause and effect happen and by the time it gets to Ted Lavender's death, he is indifferent to it and explains how he died very bluntly and had no emotion in him. This protests war by showing what war can do to a man and how death can just become normal to soldiers like