The subject of The Soldier is set before the war has actually happened, written through the eyes of a soldier who has signed up for the war, but has not actually gone yet. The subject of The Fallen differs from this in a way that instead of concentrating on the grief that may come from the war, it concentrates on the grief that is. In The Fallen, the war has happened, and many of the men have died, young and fit, and everyone in England is mourning for this terrible loss. The imagery of these poems is mainly very different. The Fallen concentrates very much on images of the soldiers in the war, specifically those young, fit men who are now dead, and then to the mourning country of England, because these young men will never experience the joy of life.
Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front very much achieves its goal to “try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.” Remarque goes to great lengths to show how the men in his novel came from ordinary backgrounds. These were men who were for the most part around 18-20 years old. The majority of Paul Bäumer’s group were his own classmates in school. Further, these men joined the German Army for patriotic and nationalist reasons. After spending some time in the trenches, they realized the true brutality of war, including the humiliation the soldiers must endure, such as using outdoor toilets in the open.
This notion is further emphasised through the use of jargon in the lines, “The Japs used to weigh us, to see how thin our bodies could get before we started dying”. This statement implies the nature of the camp to be brutal and unforgivable. Misto has incorporated both visual images and jargon to create an effective sense of authority to therefore relive their experience of war through memory. Likewise, the poem Dulce et decorum est by Wilfred Owen is how the post himself saw war with no knowledge, imagination or training which prepared Owen for the shock and suffering of front line experience. Its horrifying imagery has made it one of the most popular condemnations of war ever written.
Throughout ‘The War poems’ Owen creates a sense of sympathy for the soldiers who fight in war and are forced to endure horrific atrocities that either they themselves commit, or are committed against them, the continual assaults on their physical and emotional wellbeing. In the poems Owen recreates his experiences being an officer on the ‘Western Front’ in World War I, and voices his bitterness towards and rejection of the futility of war; the never ending loss of life at the hands of the British Military. Owen condemns those who encouraged young men to go to war and used rhetoric to give off the impression that war rewarded young men with glory. Owen rejects this in his poems by reflecting his own experiences as ‘Glorious’ and investigating the horrors of war, and their effect on the physical and emotional wellbeing of soldiers. Owen’s poems are riddled with references to the loss of youth, innocence and life.
A common theme used throughout the novel was dehumanisation in which the soldiers were deprived of their basic human qualities and personality due to the numerous horrors of war they faced each day. Remarque manages to introduce and develop the theme of dehumanisation through such techniques as symbolism, imagery and first person perspective which therefore effectively engages the reader’s interest in the novel. In the epigraph Remarque says that he “simply try to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by war.” Ironically Paul and his comrades represent a whole generation of men known to history as “the lost generation” in which eight million men were died in battle, twenty one million were injured and over six and a half million civilians were killed. This also reveals Remarque’s hatred towards the war and how affective it can be although soldiers may escape its physical injuries. The novel is continuously in first person from Paul point of view which makes it seem more real and dramatic as we can see exactly how he feels at a specific time.
The Guilt They Carried The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a set of connected short pieces that tell the stories of the men of the Alpha Company before, during and after the Vietnam War. Far from a combat story of pride and glory, it is a compassionate tale dealing with the surreal and ambiguous nature of war. O’Brien illustrates the true brutality of war, beyond the glamour of Hollywood or the excitement of a game. Guilt is present throughout the novel as all the characters in The Things They Carried are haunted by guilt and look for someone or something to blame. They feel guilty for the deaths of men in their platoon, for the deaths of Vietnamese, and for their own inadequacies.
For Paul to think that he only knows what “despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality” is at the age of twenty demonstrates how Paul is mentality affected by the war, as most teenagers do not think about such things. Paul thinks negative thoughts, and his thoughts are centralized about the war; his thoughts on death, his fear for death or the aftermath of the war, despair since he has no life outside the war. War does not only affect Paul’s mental state; the war also gives off the presence that although he may no longer be in the war, the war will always be with
Turner does an exceptional job capturing the painful and terrible moments of the war in Iraq. I can imagine a retired veteran reading this poem and instantly relating to it, which is why this poem is so powerful. The first half of the poem uses explicit language that says “Nothing but bullets and pain/ and the bled-out slumping/ and all the fucks and goddamns/ and Jesus Christ’s of the wounded/”(2-4). This powerful, yet vulgar language is what sets the tone for this poem and also delivers the message to the reader that going overseas was no easy experience. This helped in adding more of a reality and complexity to the poem.
The lyrics of this song are very strong and give us detailed descriptions on every stanza. In Soldier Side the author is a storyteller telling the tale of a soldier that goes into a land of war for no good reason, he wants to demonstrate his audience how a young soldier may feel lonely, miserable and with no hope when sent to war against his will. The point to this song that the author is making is that war is pointless, because it brings no hope for the future. Unfortunately most of the young soldiers that are sent to war, suffer an emotional breakdown, and they get full of mixed emotions. Emotions that the young soldiers can’t even understand.
How does Wilfred Owen present war though his poems? Wilfred Owen produce a poem called dulce et decorum est. In this poem Wilfred Owen explores the many horrors and cruel ordeals of World War One. He does this by using horrific imagery and techniques such as vivid imagery and dramatic descriptions. Owen then seeks to convince the reader that it is not honourable or right to die for your country, as the title of the poem suggests so.