In the novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut it is immediately clear that the author’s intent was to write a novel revealing the effect that war has on the people involved and address these issues as well as how harmful the glamorization of them are by writing an anti-war satire. Vonnegut executed this successfully by explainingly thoroughly the lasting effects war has on people and using examples of the negative and desperate ways that these people will try to cope with their feelings…
In Stevie Smith's poem, Not Waving but Drowning, the helpless cries of a drowning man are mistaken for friendly waves by onlookers. On a more complex level, the poem illustrates the lifelong struggle of depression and the agony it brings, which is only apparent when the damage has been dealt. The poem opens with a serious tone, introducing a drowning man, which then transitions into a more casual second stanza, making use of the literary device bathos. The use of this technique reveals that…
The Savage Deterioration of Man Charles Yale Harrison’s remorseless novel Generals Die in Bed strips war of it’s heroic mirage and examines it, rather, as brutalizing. The myths about war’s glory are destroyed by showing the sheer agony of the soldiers’ experiences in the trenches through factors such as abusive officers, lice and starvation. The aftermath of such hardship results in the psychological and emotional ramifications of desperation, barbarism and insanity on the common soldiers. The…
Technology is such a big part of our lives that we often forget that there is more than one way to remember the past or any event for that matter. When we see a picture for example, we are immediately taken back to that moment. Right in front of us we have the surroundings, the people, or even the things that were there the day it was taken. Although we do not realize it, when we read a poem there is a very similar effect. If we close our eyes we can can see the picture that the poet is trying…
In the short story “What I Saw of Shiloh” by Ambrose Bierce, he describes a great contrast between the nobility of officers and the brutality of battle. He paints a brutal picture of war in when he says “This fearful scene was enacted within fifty paces of our toes, but we were rooted to the ground as if we had grown there. But now our commanding officer rode from behind us to front, waved his hand with the courteous gesture that says après vous, and with a barely audible cheer we sprang into…
Soldiers that fought in the trenches had to face the constant fear of death and pain. They became very aware of their own mortality as they faced disease and bullets. Artillery and machine gun fire and barbed wire tore through their friends’ bodies and laid waste to beautiful landscapes. It would have been very easy to despair and feel as though the world around them were being destroyed. However, one soldier was able to find hope and encouragement, even when surrounded by this world of human…
This essay will aim to explore the ways in which themes of societal breakdown and honour are defined through violence in both Ovid’s The Tale of Philomela and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus . Violence is not used here as a single broad term, for in both texts there is clear delineation between masculine and feminine violence, and again between honourable and dishonourable violence. To quote Jessica Lugo, “Shakespeare’s Ovidian precursor delivers a tale of gore that develops the themes of…
na Djunisijevic Prof. Klaassen CLCV 2010A March. 14th, 2018. The Portrayal of Revenge as a Mean of Preservation Seeking vengeance is one of the central themes in Agamemnon and The Medea. Both Euripides and Sophocles explore human nature by examining the human psyche. In the two plays, Clytemnestra and Medea are vengeful and ruthless in their pursuit of justice because of the disloyalty wrought upon them by their male partners Agamemnon and Jason. By preserving themselves through actions of…
War is a lose-lose situation because as described, men are dying on the battlefield which causes great grief and anger on the homefront. Besides the situational irony conveyed in the imagery, Crane uses verbal irony- when what is said is the opposite of the intended meaning, to convey his message about the futility of war. Verbal irony begins in the title, “War is Kind”. Although Crane says war is good and kind, the readers know or will find out by the images to come in the poem, war is not kind…
Blood is a sacrifice when it comes to fighting in war. "Inspection" written by Wilfred Owen explores the idea of a soldier who comes to uniform inspection with a blood stain and yet, these blood stains are from the hard battle he had fought in the war. The poem presents the idea of the way soldiers are treated, blood being treated as dirt, and the sacrifice soldiers have to make in war. Through the use of diction, allusion, metaphor and colloquialism, Owen has explained the blood which is shed…