It is a poem that conveys a message about the brutalities and horrors of war to an ill-informed and complacent audience in England. The length of the poem is short, but powerful and wrought with vivid imagery, griping the reader’s attention from the beginning to the end. The poem focuses on the horrifying death of a solder in WWI who falls victim to gas warfare because he fails to attach his gas mask quick enough. Wilfred Owens, a war veteran himself, uses the story of the soldier to expose the harsh truths of war. With his effective use of imagery, diction and irony, Wellford Owens strips away the glory of war and reveals the horror of what it was really like to fight in WWI.
How does Mental Cases Provide Insights into War? Wilfred Owen’s poetry explores the barbaric and inhumane nature of war. In Mental Cases Owen juxtaposes the emotional and physical state of these soldiers with the image of inhumane creatures. Owen's uses imagery, personification and juxtaposition to express the horrors that these soldiers continue to endure after the war. Mental Cases illustrate the disconnection many soldiers face in society.
War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead” (How to Tell a True War Story para.91). This is how O’Brien generalized the war in the work of How to Tell a True War Story. From his work I find out why he said so. War is mystery, just like the sound which the soldiers caught.
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.
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.
What things might a soldier experience in war? What things would a soldier experience enough to ultimately change him? In Harrison’s novel Generals Die in Bed (GDIB), the horror of war is an underlying theme and is depicted through many of the challenges the narrator encounters in the text. The horror of war is portrayed through the course of the novel through things such as having a constant fear of the unknown, the psychological effects of war, man’s inhumanity to other men, and ultimately: death. Not knowing what’s around the corner is always a terrifying feeling.
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.
Owen wrote this poem to express his feelings about war and ‘the pity of war’, which he speaks about in the preface to his collection of poems published posthumously in 1920. When Owen says ‘the pity of war’ he is trying to address to the reader the horrors of the war and sympathise with the victims of war. Owen conveys ‘the pity of war’ throughout all of his poems by making them gloomy and adverse, often decorating his poems with horrific imagery and condemnation, which in turn made them unfavorable to the patriotic British person. ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ is dramatic monologue while also being an elegiacal poem, a poem meant to reflect on the lives lost at the western front during the first world war and impugn the conditions that the soldiers had to brave through everyday. Owen makes this piece an elegy by portraying the battlefield as hell ‘like a man in fire or lime’ or terrible enough to make the devil feel sick ‘like a devils sick of sin’ in order to make people realise that war will only achieve loss and sadness and convey the sadness and fear the soldiers had to face every day.
He then goes on to describe the horrific and deadly gas attack that takes the soldiers by surprise. Owen then uses strong and direct language to tell us of his disturbing dream of the man dying right in front of him whic was caused by the gas attack. In the opening stanza, Owen quickly grabs the readers attention by trying to add up to that thee war is gruesome but also it can’t be won. “Bent Double like old geggers” evokes that the soldiers are losing so much, they are willing to beg for help but also for mercy. Owen comments on how the soldiers are living in trench life.
Contemporary Poetry Anthology Project FACING IT- Life for soldiers in the heat of the Vietnam War was hell. Vietnamese soldiers used brutal, barbaric, and devilish tactics, using the terrain around them as a killing machine. They instilled fear into the American soldiers minds by using tunnels and land mines that had the ability to tear limbs from human bodies. Komunyakaa speaks about the Vietnam Memorial in his poem “Facing it”. At the beginning of the poem, his “black face fades, hiding inside the black granite.” It seems as if memories from the past have come back to the mind of the speaker, putting him back into these moments of terror in the war.