The audience has the feeling that O'Brian is presenting them with significant and personal stories from his life. This slowly but surely makes readers feel that they too are connected to the war and to the narrator.
It sometimes seems that O'Brian also addresses present day issues in the book, not just happenings from the war. The bond between him and the audience is strengthened through this technique because people become aware that there is not much difference between themselves and the author, given that they too are against immoral wars. People are drawn into O'Brian's game and start to identify with the writer, since the fact that they believe to think similarly to him makes them easier to influence as the book's action progresses. At some point in the book, most readers are liable to abandon any previous convictions they had in regard to the Vietnam War in order to replace them with O'Brian's view.
The author relates to his guilt throughout the novel, insisting that one should not feel directly guilty for an unfortunate incident from the war, as it can easily be motivated through placing the blame on something or someone else. Of course, this does little to help the guilty individual in their later lives, but is essential on the battlefield. Again, the writer wants the audience to identify with him, as he is aware that it is typical for all people to be reluctant to accept that they are responsible for an ill-fated event. Just as most of O'Brian's companions did at war, people generally prefer to motivate their faults by claiming that they are innocent and that it is because of inopportune circumstances that bad things happen.
In his attempt to present the war differently from how it happened and from how people normally like to picture it, O'Brian wrote...
He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye had a star shaped hole. I killed him." (O'Brien 180). Very similar observations can be made about Turner's poetry. Turner uses highly descriptive language when he expresses his view of "bone and gristle and flesh," the clavicle-snapped wish" and,
Red Badge of Courage and the Things They Carried both use the experience of war to highlight changes in the characters' self-perception and perception of the world. In both stories, the protagonists struggle with societal expectations and especially with normative masculinity, which is intimately linked with the experience of being in battle. Courage is a central theme in both stories, and becomes an elusive ideal for protagonists Lieutenant Cross and
W.B. Yeats' poem An Irish Airman Foresees His Death illustrates the close proximity life shares with death much like The Things They Carried. Yeats' poem is brief and in the first person describes an Irish military man explaining his decision to fight in a war in which he foresees his inevitable death. This relates to O'Brien's short story in that both protagonists understand their life is near an end due
Similarities in Theme in the Two Stories Prisoners: Both of these stories place the characters in a kind of prison. On the first page of Yellow Wallpaper the narrator has already explained that the reason she doesn't get well is because of her husband. An irony of huge magnitude, to say that one's husband is a physician and that "perhaps" that is the reason "I do not get well faster" (3).
This foolishness becomes emblematic of the entire Vietnam experience -- situations are created to display violence and bravery that have tremendous significance to the soldiers, but serve no real purpose. Just as Rat mythologizes Kurt's willingness to face death, and uses the body of an animal to vent his fury as a kind of sacrifice, Kurt himself tried to live up to a foolish ideal of what it meant
They went into a spending frenzy that would carry them though the next decade. They bought houses, started families and settled down to a life of normalcy after a decade of chaos. Illustrations began to return to resemble that of fine are of earlier times. The Invitation. Ben Stahl. Date unknown magazine photo. Al Parker. Date unknown Rise of the Atomic Age (1950-1960) The prosperity that came with the end of the
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