A Comparison of the Techniques Employed in Portraying the Horror of War in Regeneration and Journey's End

The rambunctious behavior of the soldier’s triumphant victory is a strong message visually for the viewer. These soldiers struggle to find their identity and once the war ends, the identity they’ve build at war vanishes, (McCutcheon, 2007). As a result, they essentially lose a part of them selves, (McCutcheon, 2007). When they return home, many soldiers struggle with psychological issues that prevent them from resuming their once regular lives, (McCutcheon, 2007). The images of soldiers celebrating at the end of war give the viewer a taste of this problem. This also allows the viewer insight to the deeper issues surrounding an American soldier’s mental stability and mentality. Through this image, along with many others throughout the film, the viewer is able to dig deeper and truly analyze what they are seeing.

Traumatized Literary devices are what make the story come alive and give the reader a feeling of actually being there. The literary devices increase a reader’s interest in the story and also helps keep the audience engaged. They help create a more fascinating plot. In the short story “Ambush” by TIm O’brien uses them to develop a character so much more. Mr. O’brien used internal conflict, external conflict, and flashback to put the reader in the character’s “shoes” throughout the story.

Where innumerous catastrophic events are simultaneously occurring and altering the mental capability of its viewers eternally, war is senseless killing. The participants of war that are ‘fortunate’ enough to survive become emotionally distraught civilians. Regardless of the age of the people entering war, unless one obtains the mental capacity to witness numerous deaths and stay unaffected, he or she is not equipped to enter war. Kurt Vonnegut portrays the horrors of war in Slaughterhouse Five, through the utilization of satire, symbolism, and imagery.

The strong imagery paints a picture of the battlefield and draws a connection between the past and present leaving the football players with a feeling of loss.

“Tomorrow When The War Began” by John Marsden, is a novel of survival, friendship, love and war. He uses many language techniques (e.g. simile, metaphor, personification, oxymoron, irony, symbol, allusion etc.) to get across to the reader the importance of each of the themes discussed. He also uses these techniques to set the mood in each chapter and to help emphasise each major point in the novel. “We’ve learnt a lot and had to figure out what’s important- what matters, what really matters.”- Ellie

The topic of war is hard to imagine from the perspective of one who hasn't experienced it. Literature makes it accessible for the reader to explore the themes of war. Owen and Remarque both dipcik what war was like for one who has never gone through it. Men in both All Quiet on the Western Front and “Dulce Et Decorum” experience betrayal of youth, horrors of war and feelings of camaraderie.

The new soldiers’ resistance was usually followed by an attempt to flee which brought shame and embarrassment to both the new soldiers and their families. Subsequent to the attempt to flee came a final adoption to the war in which O’Brien and many others tried so hard to get out of. O’Brien uses elements such as conflict, imagery, and tone to help convey his

It is no coincidence that Remarque and O'Brien include extremely graphic descriptions of the dead and dying throughout their work, because each author experienced these horrors firsthand from the field of combat. Remarque fought for the German Army during the infamous trench battles of World War I, witnessing death and destruction enacted on an industrial scale for the first time in human history, and his novel

As with any genre, all novels termed ‘war stories’ share certain elements in common. The place and time settings of the novels, obviously, take in at least some aspect of at least one war or conflict. The characters tend to either be soldiers or are at least immediately affected by the military. An ever present sense of doom with punctuated moments of peace is almost a standard of the war novel. Beyond the basic similarities, however, each of these battle books stands apart as an individual. Charles Yale Harrison’s World War I novel, Generals Die in Bed is, in essence, quite different than Colin McDougall’s Execution. Coming years earlier,

Contrast is an integral part of everyday life. Without contrast, everything becomes one-dimensional and bland. In a traumatic experience, such as during a war, the very nature of it creates and amplifies these contrasts within the human spirit. Timothy Findley’s The Wars is an excellent example of how contrast is created. Some examples of these contrasts are kindness and cruelty, courage and cowardice, but the most important contrast created by Findley in the novel is the one between loyalty and betrayal.

In the incredible book, All Quiet on the Western Front written by Erich Maria Remarque, the reader follows Paul Baumer, a young man who enlisted in the war. The reader goes on a journey and watches Paul and his comrades face the sheer brutality of war. In this novel, the author tries to convey the fact that war should not be glorified. Through bombardment, gunfire, and the gruesome images painted by the author, one can really understand what it would have been like to serve on the front lines in the Great War. The sheer brutality of the war can be portrayed through literary devices such as personification, similes, and metaphors.

O’Brien’s use of imagery allows him to paint a vivid depiction of the horrors experienced by the foot soldiers in Vietnam. These horrors perpetuate the physical and emotional

‘No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and the strain / have caused their stammering, disconnected talk,’ writes Siegfried Sassoon in the poem Survivors (1917). Sassoon’s irony in these lines condense a prevalent view of non-combatants during the First World War that the soldiers would recover from their physical injuries and mental illness after the phase of shock had concluded. In the short story Speed the Plough (1923), Mary Butts articulates scepticism towards the idea that Shell Shock will simply pass. Instead of employing the habitual indicators of war, the story showcases Butts’s fixation in avoiding them. Modernist writers, such as Butts, were interested in innovation and experimentation with language to create new forms of expression. The following analysis will explore how the modernist aesthetics shape this passage in order to express the experience of war but avoid recurring to the same language that explicitly evokes it.

In this essay, I will discuss how Tim O’Brien’s works “The Things They Carried” and “If I Die in a Combat Zone” reveal the individual human stories that are lost in war. In “The Things They Carried” O’Brien reveals the war stories of Alpha Company and shows how human each soldier is. In “If I Die in a Combat Zone” O’Brien tells his story with clarity, little of the dreamlike quality of “Things They Carried” is in this earlier work, which uses more blunt language that doesn’t hold back. In “If I Die” O’Brien reveals his own personal journey through war and what he experienced. O’Brien’s works prove a point that men, humans fight wars, not ideas. Phil Klay’s novel “Redeployment” is another novel that attempts to humanize soldiers in war. “Redeployment” is an anthology series, each chapter attempts to let us in the head of a new character – set in Afghanistan or in the United States – that is struggling with the current troubles of war. With the help of Phil Klay’s novel I will show how O’Brien’s works illustrate and highlight each story that make a war.

The war film genre includes films about warfare, including naval, air or land battles. Films in this genre may focus on the battles, prisoners of war, military training, life during wartime or morality and humanitarian issues of warfare. This genre commonly includes works of fiction, works based on historical facts and occasionally works based on alternate-history fiction. According to American Cinema/American Culture, the genre also includes four narrative elements: the suspension of morality during times of war, the prioritization of collective goals over individual motivations, the rivalry between men and their objectification of women and the issues of reintegrating veterans. (Belton 165-71)