Dalton Trumbo's anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun, ideally captures the horrors of war, and its effects on individual soldiers, their fate, their mentality, and their families. The author introduces the reader to Joe Bonham, a young American soldier tragically wounded on the last day of World War One. Throughout the story, the author leads the reader through the emotions, thoughts, and reflections of the protagonist, and also to the honesty and detail with which the story is written, the reader is able to fully experience the impact and the tragedy of war. But with tragedies of war also brings upon the suppression of war, and with the novel Lord of the Flies, William Golding shows how our society suppresses the evil that is presented in all of us. Throughout this adventure Jack changes from a well mannered choir boy, who was scared to kill a pig, to a savage hunter who leads his band of hunters to kill everything in site.
Despite the constant threat of enemy fire, everyone there have to struggle for food, deal with the lack of trained replacement troops, and the large possibility of death. The book highlights just how horrendous a battle can be out at war. It reveals that in a battle people are really blew to bits. For instance, in one of the fights Paul observes just how badly people were being wounded. He sees his comrades legs, arms, heads being blew apart.
Terror and fear are the main emotions expressed in this book. These soldiers are forced to fight in horrifically frightening situations and under pressure for their survival. Even when these young men aren’t fighting and are relaxing at their camps, there is always that constant fear something might happen. When they were about to go out into The Front, moments before hand, a bunch of newly made coffins were moved to the camp, right in front of the soldiers. Just making the reality of hope for survival even less likely, and crushing their spirits.
Which sets the book of to a strong start, as the declaration was passionately written during the war. Siegfried Sassoon used repetition through his declaration , making sure that he feels strongly against war. During the declaration Sassoon explains the horrors if war in many different ways. He repeats the word “suffering” throughout the declaration to put emphasis on what the war is really like for the soldiers that are fighting for our country. He also talks strongly about how the sufferings are being “prolonged” as he tired of witnessing men “being sacrificed” to this awful war.
Paul joined the army directly after high school and never really experienced life. Due to his inexperience and lack of knowledge of the world, the war becomes Paul’s life and in the end, his destruction. I think there were three turning points in Paul’s experience of the war which changed his perspective - when he kills a French soldier in close combat, when he returns home, and when the war appears to be lost and coming to an end. Paul is an experienced fighter whose bullets have killed many people but he has never thought philosophically about that fact. He is fighting for a cause he doesn’t really understand but yet he continues to kill and see his friends die.
In the long journey to come he will experience death, and murder. In his journey Ishmael becomes a child soldier, he now has new goals, staying alive, and killing the enemy separated him from his family. In this book Ishmael tells his experience as a child soldier, the horrors he saw and the things he had to do in order to survive a bloody war. He also tells the difficulty it is to transition from being a soldier to trying to be a child again. This book is a heart breaking eye opener that shows us the horrors that many children around the world are facing.
Although most war novels are filled with patriotism and honor, Remarque’s instead focuses on the brutality and senselessness of war. The main character, Paul Baumer, serves in the German Army during WWI. The novel shows his struggles throughout the war and it seems that Baumer resembles Remarque and his own struggles of war. In the novel, Baumer and his comrades endure a full scale war. The novel shoes the misery of war and the everlasting effects it has on the soldiers; even Baumer cannot escape those circumstances.
Paul and his comrades enlist as fresh creatures of the world that change due to the abhorrence in World War One. The young men lose all hope of surviving through the novel because of the severe devastation they encounter. In the war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque exploits nature images such as, water, animals, and the earth, to exemplify the theme of the destructiveness of war. To begin, Remarque employs images of water to demonstrate the destructiveness of combat. For example, as he recognizes the uncertain feeling of claustrophobia setting in Paul describes how he, “views the front as a mysterious whirlpool.
Our officers oughta be shot for that. She was carryin’ supplies and war material.” A few paragraphs later the book ends, the protagonist knowing that his own “heroism” in battle, the blood-lust that fuelled the victory, was manipulated, based on a lie. It’s a final moment of
The novel implicitly associates this realization of the necessity of a personal war with adulthood and the loss of childhood innocence. For most of Gene’s classmates, World War II provides the catalyst for this loss, and each reacts to it in his own way—Brinker by nurturing a stance of boldness, for example, and Leper by descending into madness. Gene himself, though, states that he fought his own war while at Devon and killed his enemy there. The obvious implication is that Finny, as the embodiment of a spirit greater than Gene’s own, was his enemy, casting an unwavering shadow over Gene’s life. One might alternatively interpret Gene’s statement to mean that this enemy was himself, his own resentful, envious nature, which he “killed” either by knocking Finny from the tree or by obtaining forgiveness from Finny for doing so.