Thematic Use of Power and Responsibility in Three Short Stories
How can anyone possibly imagine how difficult waging war is without experiencing firsthand the horrors of being on the battlefield? The classics of Western literature have invariably been inspired by tales of soldiers sacrificing their lives valiantly, and today the harrowing stories told by soldiers returning from war are recreated, filmed and captured for posterity. One central concept, shared by all genuine representations of human combat, is that the reality of war inevitably involves balancing the struggle for power against the responsibility necessary to wield such authority. The act of reading a well-crafted war story can lead to a journey of self-reflection for soldiers and civilians alike. Penned during distinctly disparate eras in American military history, Carolyn Forche's simple yet searing poem The Colonel, George Orwell's mundane description of an execution in A Hanging, and Tim O'Brien's haunting elegy for a generation lost in the jungles of Vietnam The Things They Carried each present readers with a stark reminder that beneath the veneer of glorious battle lies only a desperate attempt by man to exert power over one another. All three authors imbue their work with a grim severity, presenting the reality of war as it truly exists. Men inflict grievous injuries on one another, breaking bodies and shattering lives, without ever truly knowing for what or whom they are fighting for. With their contributions to the genre of war literature, these authors sought to lift the veil of vanity which, for so many wartime writers, perverts a terrible reality with patriotic fervor. In doing so, this triumvirate of wartime writers manages to convey the true sacrifice of the conscripted soldier, the broken innocence which clouds a man's first kill, and the abandonment of one's identity which becomes necessary in order to kill again.
It is no coincidence that Orwell, Forche and O'Brien each include extremely graphic descriptions of the dead and dying throughout their work, because each author experienced these horrors firsthand while working near or within combat zones. Orwell served as a military policeman for the British army in the 1920s, during that nation's imperial occupation of Burma....
O'Brien was drafted to fight in the quagmire known as the Vietnam War, and like so many other young and vibrant American men of his generation, he was forced to sacrifice his youth on the altar of patriotism. Each of these three authors proves extremely capable of capturing the grim essence of war through the style of prose they choose to employ during certain intensely evocative passages. After setting the stage with a few seemingly innocent descriptions of her poem's titular colonel, Forche jars the reader with an unsettling description of his contempt for human life, remembering coldly how "the colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass" (563). This motif is echoed by O'Brien's almost clinical inventory of his first victim, in which he finds that "his fingernails were clean, the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him" (528). Throughout both accounts, the authors employ the subtle use of vivid corporeal imagery to transform a dead body, one casualty amongst millions, into an emblem for the senseless tragedy endured by both the vanquished and the victor.
A lesson that can only be truly learned by those who have fought for their friends and families on foreign shores holds that the fortunate survivor, he who escapes the fray physically unscathed, is seldom spared the mental anguish and spiritual guilt of his actions. In Orwell's account of a Burmese prisoner being hung -- account typified by his infamously subtle sense of humor infecting the ostensibly tragic scene with a touch of absurd comedy -- one especially moving passage concerns the author's sudden awareness of the murder which would soon be committed. When Orwell's…
