Theme Loss In Zinky Boys, By Svetlana Alexievich

In society, we tend to see tremendous families loosing a loved one due to war. Some of those incidences that occur to soldiers at war, tend to be harsh and unforgettable. In the book, Zinky boys, by Svetlana Alexievich, the author shows how her project of gathering interviews from people that lost a loved one at war, made it possible for her to express the idea of loss in different aspects from people’s voices. Alexievich was from Belarus, who wrote in Russia how the voices from the Afghanistan and Soviet soldiers expressed their views towards their motherland and what the real truth was from their opinion. The main point of Alexievich’s project is to explore lives of veterans and their opinion about the war. There will always be war because …show more content…
This essay will discuss how Alexievich explores the theme loss from her interviews that she gathered. When Alexievich shows us different behaviors of people involved with the war, it demonstrates us how there are different kinds of losses that emerge from it.
To begin with, Alexievich shows us how the idea of loss can change the way people live their lives. The feeling inside a person can change when they realize that they lost someone close to them. In the story, Alexievich interviewed mothers that sought the challenges of loss due to loosing a child in the war. The relationship between a mother and his or her child is very powerful. The mothers explain how their children were connected to the war even before growing up. In one of the interviews, the mother explained how her son was surrounded with soldiers just like his father so there was really no one to stop him from going to war: “His fathter was a soldier and we’d lived in army compounds all our lives. He ate with soldiers, cleaned cars with them, so there was no one to say ‘no’ when he applied for the military academy” (Alexievich 63). …show more content…
Soldiers loose the interest in life that they once had when returning home from war, because everything seems different in their eyes now. As soldiers return home, they don’t really know how to change back to their old lifestyle that they once lived in. According to Alexievich, one of the military advisors explained his life after rwar, “Now I sit at home in my armchair in front of the TV. Could I kill a man? I couldn’t sweat a fly! If we buy a live chicken from the market, its my wife who has to slaughter it. Those first few days I was there, with the bullets slicing off the mulberry branches, there was a sense of unreality”