¶ … Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien and the poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen are two wonderful pieces of literature that depict the horrors of war in a way that is both visceral and astute. The images, the relationships, the deaths, the birth of the unknown void, and the perils of being in a life or death situation are brilliantly told within the context of a battlefield. But what are the true horrors of war? Are they simply the awful experiences and the loss of life? Is the horror of it all the act of tolerating it and then becoming another person after? Regardless of what people experience during a war, it changes everyone involved. The loss of innocence, the loss of hope, the loss of sanity, the loss of the known, of stability, those are the true horrors of war. Although both works deal with the effects of war on soldiers, the poem does it in a way that shows a scene, a page of war. The short story reveals what happens after, what happens before and what happens in the middle, the little things. "Dulce et Decorum Est" has several scenes in the poem that show death and blood and gore. In the middle of the poem the line: "GAS! Gas! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;" (Owen 1) prepares the reader for the catastrophic events that will unfold as the soldiers experience the attack. Much like in other war related stories or poems, the fear, the anticipation often comes back with the soldiers who experiences war. The constant fear of being attacked or remembering what happened there, that is what is true fear and horror for them. They say it is always calmest before the storm, but it also the tensest, especially if one knows a storm is coming. This line is very similar to the anticipation...
His depiction of waiting and preparing for battle, is similar in feeling to Owen's.
Question 5. There have been several memorable moments in the films we have watched in class. For instance, in the Leopard Man, the scene in which the killer believes to hear castanets being played and a woman walking towards him provides psychological insight into the killer's mental state; he was not only paranoid, but appeared to be haunted by his crimes. In "Cruising," the gay club scenes add to the confusion
War The Experience of War War has changed greatly in character from the days of knights in shining armor. The concept of a "state" rather than just a regional ruler has changed the dynamic of war. Rather than meeting on a battlefield and duking it out, two armies now willfully attack civilian targets to demoralize a population, cut off trade routes to starve a population, and, if it comes to it, invade
It makes sense, then, that H.G. Wells once "said he would 'rather be called a journalist than an artist'" (Wells qtd. In McConnell 176). If the dangers of the twentieth century would come from the way unrestricted scientific advancement coupled with self-interest results in new, terrifying methods of industrialized slaughter, then the particular mode or perspective of the artist, as an opposed to the journalist, would be insufficient or irrelevant.
The 1930s proved to be an example of such an inward-looking period. The elected Japanese legislature could not summon similar confidence in democracy, in the hearts of the populace. Also, moderate Japanese politicians found it almost impossible to control the military within the framework of existing institutions. Finally, the invasion of China made use of initially effect techniques such as mass slaughter of civilians and rape as a means
" Mimic, however, is to Jones the beginning of horror's conscious assessment of the ideology that spawned the horror in the first place: [Mimic] is neither campy, nor self-conscious. It is a classic creepy film in the tradition of Them!,…and begins with a plague carried by roaches in the subterranean tunnels of New York city. In order to stop the plague, which is killing the city's children, a female entomologist, who
In one sequence, O'Brien describes in poetic eloquence the same patterns which the research cited here above notes. Particularly, though all are exposed to the same terrors and opportunities in Vietnam, some are more prone than others to returning home with the dependencies formed at war. O'Brien tells that "you come over clean and you get dirty and then afterward it's never the same. A question of degree. Some make
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