Mental Cases was written to demonstrate the mental consequences of war on participating soldiers in World War I. The subjects of this poem are the inmates in a military hospital. The poem displays a part of the war that to some civilians can be considered worse than losing your life, losing your mind due to shellshock. Owen describes how they are now forced to re-live the terrible acts that they have witnessed on the battlefield. The mood of the poem is one of fury, this is shown throughout the poem with the use of imagery.
In the beginning of the poem the soldier starts to reminisce about his past. The cyclical nature of the poem is appropriate as it emphasises the pain and the nightmares that are continuously in his mind, giving him no peace or respite. “Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry… a leap of purple spurted from his thigh.” This image when contrasted to the images of his previous life, serves to create a sense of loss for the young. The injury still to this day causes him pain when he thinks about the life he could have had. The soldier reflects on his “youthful” days which effectively exposes Owen’s perspective on the aftermath of war.
Affield’s memoir illustrated the very real and raw aspects of war. Wendell’s personal account of life as a soldier started with the horrors of boot camp, eventually explained the terrors of war and finally ended with the rejection and ridicule that he and other soldiers endured on his return home. His detailed accounts helped readers better understand the situation and events that occurred during and after the war in Vietnam. Once Affield enlisted with the United States Navy he was originally stationed on a gunner Naval ship, USS Rogers, and traveled to Vietnam to aide in fighting the Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin. This West Pac cruise was difficult, yet it ended up being one of the least devastating assignments of his Vietnam experience.
Due to his plight, he sees the bridge as a dead end for him: “I am seventy six years old. I have come twelve kilometers now and I think now I can go no further.”(2) The war has affected his state of mind and destroyed the love of life in him. Through this character Hemingway is actually making an example of the old man WITH the aim of describing the effects of war on the state of mind of innocent civilians. Neither his tired body nor his confused mind seems capable of grasping or coping with the sudden collapse of his entire world. By the end of the short story, the narrator, who is a soldier in this war, , reports to the reader that the old man “got to his feet, swayed from side to side and then sat down backwards in the dust.”(3) This description is very telling because it reflects the inevitability of death when it comes to war.
‘Mental Cases’, on the other hand, describes soldiers who had devolved shell-shock after the war, hence ‘Mental Cases’. Owen used his own experiences to assist him with the poem, as he himself spent time in a military hospital suffering with shell-shock. ‘Mental Cases’ by Wilfred Owen is a dark, depressing and violent poem. It gives the reader haunting images, for example “Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets”. This gives the reader the image of eyes being plucked out of their sockets, Owen has used such powerful imagery to build up tension and add to the suspense.
The new weapon napalm was used to burn villages many lives in Vietnam were lost as they were in South Africa. Both countries were both ruins and its people were angry as is shown in the language of the two poems. Both these poems are full of bitterness. The black poet who wrote Nothing’s Changed uses a vicious irony “we know where we belong” to show that he feels blacks and whites will never truly reconcile. His pent - up rage is expressed again in the final stanza “ Hands burn for a stone, a bomb to shiver down the glass”.
Law of War During war, the soldiers exposed to too much pressure. Most of them try to deal with the enemy according to the law of jungle “kill or you’ll be killed”. They try to dehumanize the enemy to give themselves the right to kill him without felling guilty. However, after the application of this rule, most of the soldiers feel compunction because they realize that they kill a human been. In the story “The Main I Killed”, the author Tim O`Brien illustrates to us the reaction of three American soldiers after killing a Vietnamese man during the Vietnam War.
Owen wants his reader to feel exactly what he felt about the war, persuade his reader to believe the terror, pain and torture of the war, how devastating can a war effect a human being. He uses imagery and innovative metaphors through the poem. In the first two lines, ‘Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge’, Owen is using figurative language combined with simile and alliteration literary devises to reveal the reality of the war. Soldiers are
Owen then goes on to describe how the mental trauma becomes worse. “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” This tells us the soldiers mind is haunted by the sight of his fellow soldier dying from the horrible gas. He is dramatizing this scene some time after it occurred, and his dreams are still filled with this unforgettable sight, which becomes a regular nightmare for the soldier. Wilfred Owen wrote this to shock the reader, and to make the reader think about what
In Tim o’ briens “the man I killed” the authors concept on dehumanization was a sense of fantasy.as protagonist in the short story tim dehumanizes his victim by killing him with a grenade in the villages of my khe. As tim starts to describe the wounds that the dead soldier inflicted, he starts to build upso much guilt and confusion for the guy. Foretelling an entire life for his victim as if he knew the dead soldier beforehand. For example “He was not a fighter,his health was poor, his body small frail. He liked books.