Analysis Of Voces Inocentes

To be engaged in war is to be engaged in an armed conflict. Death is an all too ordinary product of war. It is an unsolicited reward for many soldiers that are fighting for their country’s own fictitious freedom. For some of these men, the battlefield is a glimpse into hell, and for others, it is a means to heaven. Many people worry about what happens during war and what will become of their loved ones while they’re fighting, but few realize what happens to those soldiers once they come home. The short stories "Soldier's Home” by Ernest Hemingway and "Speaking of Courage” by Tim O'Brien explore the thematic after effects of war and how it impacts a young person's life. Young people who

Not only are these infantrymen children, they are bamboozled and scammed into enlisting. Vonnegut harkens this back to a completely different war, the Children’s Crusade. In the first chapter the reader learns of it when he writes “Mackay told us that the Children’s Crusade started in 1213 when two monks got the idea of raising armies of children in Germany and France and selling the in North Africa as slaves. Thirty thousand children volunteered, thinking they were going to Palestine” (Vonnegut, 20). This is a straightforward commentary on his part in the war he and the protagonist of his novel, Pilgrim, were involved in. Vonnegut is correlating the Children's Crusade to WW2 and in doing so providing his assessment on the driving force behind the war efforts. In her writings on

There are many layers of themes that are subtlety imbedded into the film. The political theme of the film is a truly intriguing portrayal of life in Spain during this tense time. The underlying message of the film is one of defending the freedom of expression. It explores the importance of gaining knowledge through one’s own personal experiences. Culture is used as a pathway to achieve personal freedom. In addition, the film attempts to break some of the taboos surrounding an adequate education, focusing instead on this education through experience. Observation is used as a way to awaken the senses. Another theme that was imbedded in the film was childhood with the inclusion of a vast number of topics. The film not only contains scenes that deal with war but it includes scenes that include family, love, and

In the novel, Gene, Finny, Leper, and others fear enlisting for World War II after they graduate. Gene says that many of the teachers "loosened their grip" on the boys, knowing what lay ahead of them after they graduate. As the school year progressed, the boys anxiety increased. They all knew what was coming up, though none of them wanted to accept

The story “The Making and Unmaking of a Child Solider” is an insightful look into the life of a child drawn into the horror of war, yet still managing to survive. Throughout the story you see several examples of how a child evolves in spite of adversity and violence.

This passage is very significant to the reality of the soldiers in the Vietnam War and brings to life the setting of the entire novel. The soldiers were primarily teenagers and young men in their early twenties who had not yet had the chance to experience life. They soon had found themselves in the midst of an intense war with nothing but uncertainty and fear. They hated it and they loved the fear and adrenaline that ran through their skin and bones. It

Going through an era when the Vietnam War was a smash hit in your town, many high school senior boys would be drafted out if their number was on the list of people. The men drafted had to leave behind their families and aspirations. Tim O’Brien uses different perspectives in The Things They Carried to show if something tragic happens in life, consequently dealing with it may be hard. Moving on will help in the future.

A heavy downpour falls in the muddy streets. Zoomed in close-ups of soldiers’ boots stepping in muddy puddles and water splashing. Tall and short silhouettes move in slow motion toward the camera. As they move in closer, we can clearly see soldiers. Among the soldiers, are four smaller children with their arms raised and hands crossed behind their necks. They are being pushed and shoved by the soldiers. The rain falls on their dirty faces, at a standstill, as if paralyzed by an obscure resignation of expressions. Their march continues in sluggish motion. We then hear the thoughts of one of the boys, Chava, on the soundtrack: “Tengo mucha sed ... Me duelen los pies ... Tengo piedras en los zapatos ... Seguro nos van a matar ... ¿Por qué nos quieren matar, si no hicimos nada.” (I am very thirsty ... My feet hurt ... I have rocks in my shoes ... I’m sure they are going to kill us ... Why do they want to kill us? We’ve done nothing.) (Tovar Canelo) The fates of the four boys’ dawn on the audience. The suspense is almost unbearable, wanting to be able to jump into the film and save these poor and frightened children. The screen then turns white and the story begins in flashback. We got a glimpse of the ending and now we are hooked and crave for the whole

During the war, a significant amount of things happen to different groups of families in their homeland. There are soldiers that are fighting for the protection of their families and there are many families that are doing anything in their power to stay safe through the chaos. Yet a number of the individuals involved in the conflict have a tendency to try and escape the madness. In spite of the madness, some children have the advantage to escape yet they are equally impacted with long term trauma by the war as those who did not have the opportunity to depart.

Even though the soldiers join the war as naive youths, the war rapidly changes them and they develop into young men. Surrounded by death, the boys are bound to foresee the fragility of their own lives and are stripped of the carelessness and brazenness of youth. The dreadful horrors around the boys bound them to consider a world that does not accommodate to their childish and simplistic view. They want to only see a separation between what is right and what is wrong, they instead find moral doubt. Where they had wanted to see order and meaning, they only found senselessness and disorder. Where they wanted to find heroism, they only found the selfish instinct of self-preservation. These realizations destroyed the innocence of the boys, maturing and thrusting them into their manhood.

At first they are children therefore naïve and scared of war. So it becomes a constant process of changing their emotions. Ishmael says “When the soldier stood in front of me, I avoided eye contact, so he straightened my head until my eyes met his. He gave me the gun. I held it in my trembling hands. He then added the magazine, and I shook even more” (109). The war leaders know this so they begin convincing them this is their war by depicting the enemy as the cause of the pain. Lieutenant says to them “‘some of you are here because they have killed your parents or families, others because this is a safe place to be … we need the help of able boys and men to fight these rebels ‘“(106). The kids now feel helpless since they are faced with the ultimatum of either leaving with no rations or fighting for the cause. All things considered they have no choice but to join this war. Now that they have agreed they had to ensure they detested enemies and felt nothing when killing. Lieutenant said “’ they have lost everything that makes them human, they do not deserve to live. That is why we must kill every single one of them…’” (108). ironically, that quote is essentially what the soldiers are doing to the kids verbalized. After a while the army breaks the children and they have lost all of their innocence and all that is left is war hardened. Beah says “I could become angry, yes, begin to visualize

Men are always last, women and children always go first. But in a war so brutal even the youngest of boys are treated as adults and feared like criminals. The Bite of the Mango and A Long Way Gone show exactly how men and women endure a distinct type of pain throughout this war. Being a boy means a lot to the rebels. They can use you to fight their war, ignite fear into people’s life and destroy as they

The students of the Centre are conformists. They are typical example of Spanish citizens to live under Franco’s Rule during the 1950’s. They accept what they are thought by Don Pablo and Doña Pablo and do not question it. In contrast to the students Ignacio is an independent character who does not conform to the society of the Centre. He challenges what the students have been thought. ‘Ciegos! Ciegos y no invidentes, imbéciles.’ Ignacio keeps on emphasising how there is a division in life between ‘los invidentes’ and ‘los videntes’ and tries to spread his darkness to the people of the centre. ‘La Guerra que me consume os consumirá.’

Continuing in the theme of conformity; if the boys are united by their heteronomy, Cuellar’s castration, in contrast, is the source of his ostracism. His unfortunate accident is a wound that ‘time opens instead of closes’, and as the story progresses, Vargas Llosa juxtaposes the boys socially inclusive youthful pastimes of football and studying mentioned earlier in the novel with his comparatively solitary penchant for the ocean and surfing “a puro pecho o con colchón” (94) in chapter five. In this passage, his distance from the others is symbolised by the isolation of the sea; the narrator says the water “se lo tragó” (95) and later, the boys state that “se perdió” (96). Clearly, Cuellar’s failure to partake in the testosterone fuelled rituals of sexual maturity in the city has seen him shunned from the rest of the boys and resigned to hanging out with “rosquetes, cafichos y pichicateros” (96) instead – the modern, metropolitan outcasts. Evidently, Cuellar is incapacitated by this highly heteronormative lifestyle, as the inherent masculinity of the city is a fixed identity that will perpetually exclude him, or anyone else who cannot fulfil Peruvian societies idea of gender appropriate behaviour.

Its unrelenting portrayal of irrational death and annihilation goes well beyond other German war films of the 1950s. Its vigilant proposition that at least some of the boys might be accountable for not only their own deaths but the others deaths as well, implying that the older German soldiers indubitably should have known better.