The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our heart. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in war” (87-88). Paul was living life as a civilian for eighteen years, not knowing the horrors of the world, and as a young adult in the war, he witnessed his first horror, such as his first bombing, his first explosion, first exposure to numerous of dead bodies etc, which will traumatize him in future civilian life since one does not simply forget the first raw, gory images. The age of eighteen can be considered the age of a young adult that is still growing and experiencing life, and when teengaers are thrown into the abyss of war, it prevents young soldiers from striving and progressing; as being an adult is heavily weighed on an adolescent
He gave out everything in the war, just to be left with a scar that will make him impotent for the rest of his life. Jake turns to alcohol to bury his sorrow thoughts, but when he sees Brett, the woman he loves, his sadness over powers him. He knows he can never have her, and that she will always be his friend, not his lover. His inability to have her makes Barnes think of himself as less of a man. Although, he is disillusioned by his injury, he still is cognizant about the unproductiveness of the Lost Generation.
"He fell on a day that was... All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. "(p.296) He has been through such agony with his fellow comrades dying, and the horrors of the war, but yet he dies on the quietest day of the war. Paul has been in the war nearly from the beginning, and he has survived a host of battles on the front line even while seeing many of his fellow soldiers die. Throughout the novel, Paul slowly loses his hope that he will ever get out of the war alive, and he begins to think that even if he does survive, he will not fit back into the normal routine of his community back home.
These feeling are expressed in the story about Rat Kiley's letter, with which the chapter is started - with his feelings of grief about loss and final «cooze», because he was not written back and he could not cope with his loss. His pain is shown in the shoking story of shooting baby buffalo. However, all these stories might have never happened, the soldiers were fighting the war and facing blood, troops and losses, struggling because of their youth and immaturity, fear that cannot be ignored about war. This terrible experience of war is the only truth that author wants to make the readers understand in his
In All Quiet on the Western Front the protagonist is Paul Baumer because we experience the story from his point of view and thus we sympathize with him. Paul’s situation is troubling because his life and the lives of other soldiers his age “have become a wasteland” (20). War has changed them and the world so much that they don’t really know what they are going to do once the war finishes. They don’t know any trades; all they know is war. The value of their lives was also changed by war.
written by Jessie Pope, and finally contrast this with the poems by Owen. DISABLED I think that in the poem 'Disabled', Wilfred Owen is trying to convey the real tragedy of war. Many people think only of those killed but reading the poem you remember that many people who were not killed in the war could still have suffered a lot more. In the poem Owen focuses on one young man, a single victim of war. It shows the effect the war has on the young man's life, when on returning from the war he has been maimed "legless, sewn short at elbow" Owen writes the poem with style.
This simile is an important contrast of the information people were fed at the time of soldiers being strong and proud. Owen strips away the image of a glorified war to reveal the bitter and cruel nature of the war. The bitter imagery “Coughing like hags” and “but limped on” also develops the idea of these young man seeming old. Owen takes pity on these tired and weary soldiers as he describes them in the most unglamorous, inglorious manner. The statement “all went lame, all blind’, while being somewhat hyperbolic suggests that the soldiers had lost all previous objectives of war along with the line “cursed through sludge”.
They will die in the war for a cause they don’t fully understand or necessarily support and will soon be forgotten… In doing so Owen provokes the thought whether war is really worth going to as it degrades the life of millions of men as they get obliterated for their country. The format off the poem is supposed to be constant, with five stressed and unstressed syllables in every line. The first line does follow this rule but the second and third lines do not. This rule gets broken and is ignored as the lines seem irregular and out of place. Through this he creates the impression that the men who are in the war is out of place and is not meant to be there.
“In modern narrative, it is not so much what story is told, but the way it is told that captivates the reader.” This statement is true of Ernest Hemingway’s writing style used in his novels. An example of this is in his novel The Sun Also Rises. His unique writing style sparked reader’s interests from the beginning of his career in the 1920s. His simple and direct prose complemented by the use of short and factual sentences and his repetitive dialogue demanded that readers look beyond the surface. Hemingway termed this technique as the Iceberg Theory.
The protagonist, a disabled soldier that had been released from military service, is depicted as incomplete due to a lost-limb. He shivered not only in his ghastly suit of grey, but for the unacceptable, drastic change in his life from a whole to a fragmented body. Alliteration of the consonant ‘g’ is used to strengthen the menacing and somber tone, and evokes readers’ pity towards the distressing situation of the soldier. As the government abandons the lives of soldiers and leaves them to fend off the ammunition and threat on no man's land themselves, the devastating alteration for the soldiers' future is destined--- destined to crumble, destined to shatter, destined to descend the infinite abyss of tragedy and woe. From ‘waiting for dark’, we can infer that it wasn’t the dark of the night the solider was expecting, but ‘dark’ as grim, dour death.