The repetition of question marks and dashes illustrate the confusion and frustration witnessing Owens fellow comrades, it is a demanding tone begging for explanation for the entrapment of victims. And as a result, it encourages the reader to consider the impact the war had on both, the soldiers who survived, and those who didn’t. Dulce et Decorum Est brings to reality that war is not what people say it is. Given by its very title, ‘It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’. Although, it only an illusion reinforced throughout the poem, along with its irony and sarcasm that is ‘The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori’, it is not sweet and fitting to die for ones country.
When battle breaks out, Himmelstoss pretends to be hurt and hides in order to get out of fighting. He acts as a big, mean, and forceful guy until he feels the same fear and terror as the rest of the soldiers in the trenches do. Himmelstoss spoke about being courageous and how nothing scares him, but once he had to experience war for himself he realized it is not that easy to be
Anderson shows that war has a damning effect on war journalists as well as soldiers, and that their loved ones and families are also heavily affected. One of these effects on the characters is that they lose a sense of hope and as a result, always expect the worse. Talzani depends on fate to answer the toughest questions in his life and to comfort him by covering up horrors in his past by blaming it on the power of fate, which is out of his control. Dr Talzani admits, ‘would you believe that sometimes I am so tired, or the cave is so dark, I’m not even sure of the colours I give them’. To make himself feel better he embodies a fatalistic view which is that ‘there is no pattern to who lives or dies in war’.
How is conflict presented in the poems Futility and The Charge of the Light Brigade? The title of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Futility’ captures the dominant sense of uselessness and helplessness in relation to conflict, felt by the soldiers in the face of their comrade’s recent death. The poem focuses on the effect of conflict and is focused on an injured, probably dead soldier. Owen uses this soldier to question to point of life being created it can be destroyed so easily. In contrast Tennyson’s Charge depicts a disastrous battle during the Crimean War and therefore shows the disbelief and horror of conflict.
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
Owen rejects this misrepresentation of war and confronts the audience through descriptive visual imagery in the line “at every jolt, the blood came gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs”(Line 22), emphasising the gruesome details of his real experiences drawing an insight into the treacherous warfare that society for many years have thought of as noble. Owen skilfully manipulated his poetic medium to convey the psychological affects of war in Mental
The novel shoes the misery of war and the everlasting effects it has on the soldiers; even Baumer cannot escape those circumstances. Before the war Baumer was a nice, empathetic, and gentle person but the war has him almost disconnected from his feelings. He becomes numb to the evil surrounding him. His friends are quickly lost to the cruelty and horror of war. Some died a quick death while others died a slow, painful death, showing the reality of war.
Throughout the collection of war poems by Wilfred Owen, all the poems share the same subject; “the pity of war”. Therefore unpleasant details and exaggerated emotions play a big part from a war poet who was serving for his country in World War One. W.B. Yeats dismissed Owen’s poetry as ‘all blood’ and ‘dirt’ you could argue that Owen is a little obsessed with it but with no hope and constant death surrounding him on the Western Front who can blame him for feeling this way? The war poem collection could also be considered to face other aspects of war not necessarily the graphic events, but the hatred of civilians, justified details and distractions from war such as coping mechanisms.
The fact that an observer cannot recognise this group as members of their own species further dehumanises the soldiers and shows the reader just how much that war has impacted on these men, both physically and mentally. ‘Set-smiling corpses’ shows us a clever wordplay used by Owen, in that smiling has normally positive connotations but Owen has troped the image into one of negativity, to one of death and despair. These men are not smiling due to happiness, rather madness and death. Wordplay is also utilised in the word ‘rucked’. This gives us a picture of a footy match, but in reality there is a horrific image to behold - one of dead bodies piled in heaps.
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.