Becca's Story

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara is not just a telling of the Battles of Gettysburg, but includes fictional accounts on a real event. It takes you back in time to some of the bloodiest battles in our nation’s history, where one side fought for freedom, and the other fought for a new way of life. The novel takes you on a journey through the eyes of various leaders from the Union and Confederate sides, including Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, Arthur Fremantle, John Buford, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. The book includes the four days both leading to and including the most courageous and nation changing battles of America’s history.

How maybe he was a scholar and maybe his parents were farmers.  Then O'Brien goes on to talk of maybe why this young man was in the army, and maybe why he was fighting;  these are something’s that are taught in the schools.  O'Brien states that the man may have joined because he was struggling for independence, juts like all the people that were fighting with him.  Maybe this man had been taught from the beginning that to defend the land was a mans highest duty and privilege.  Then on the other hand maybe he was not a good fighter, and maybe in poor health but had been told to fight and could not ask any questions.  These reasons are all reasons that are taught in textbooks; they go along with the idea of the draft.  Some people go fight because they want to and others go because they are told they have to. How do you tell these people apart in the heat of battle or when they are dead?  The way that O'Brien starts to describe the young man as someone who was small and frail, and maybe had plans for a bright future puts sorrow in the readers heart, in that all his plans can not happen for him or maybe the family that is longing for his return.  It also shows the regret that maybe going on in the killers’ mind.  For O'Brien to be writing on how this young mans life has come to a sudden end and his plans for the future is over is intriguing.  Then to add to that he had the story written through the eyes of the soldier that ended this young mans life.  The

The comparisons in the plot service in molding the books and helping the reader to have a better understanding of a soldier’s thoughts, and their mental state of mind. Close friendships form between the boys and other soldiers in their lines, in both cases the friend dies, forcing reality to set in and the boys are stricken with fear, and an urge for blood. At the beginning of the book, like Charley in “Soldier’s Heart,” Henry has certain morals he wants to keep, but loose in the heat of battle, becoming a savage in order to protect himself and his country. Surviving to see the end of the war, both boys have a wound left over from the war, whether it be a mental or physical scar, it is still present. These stories are alike in a numerous amount of ways that gives the reader a better sense of knowledge of what the soldiers go through during battle.

With this part of the story, O’Brien is able to inject the theme of shame motivating the characters in the book. This chapter is about how the author, who is also the narrator, is drafted for the war. He runs away to the border between Canada and the United States, he stays in a motel with an old man for about a week and finds that he should go to war for his country. In the beginning it was about shame, he didn’t want to look like a coward because in truth he was scared. He was afraid to face the pressures of war, the humiliation and the fact of losing “everything”. This man was an average person who lived an average life with no problems, until he got the notice about the war, which caused the shame and fear of being seen as a bad person to come out.

The second theme is the unromantic reality of war. Richie and most other soldiers enter the war with illusions about what the war will be like. Like most other civilians, he learned what war is from movies he watched and stories that he heard and they portray battles as heroic and glorious, the army being organized and efficient, and the warfare depending on skills and

The novel The Killer Angles, by Michael Shaara, gives a story like depiction of the American Civil War at the Battle of Gettysburg. In this novel we see the views of both Confederate and Union armies. The officers for both sides in this novel used to go to war with each other but are now on different sides according to their political views. In the end both armies realized the war had accomplished nothing but all the deaths of soldiers.

This story was more of a personal narrative that tells a story about war and how not only does it affect men, but it also involves many others in the world. The story is told about a young woman whose brother died at the age of eighteen in war. She reflects through all of the memories she had with her brother, the good and the bad. The story is such an emotional narrative that the author pulls you into the story. As someone reads this the reader will feel a similar emotion as the author was feeling at the time of grief and heartache. The reason that this story is a narrative, because this story is told by the author about her experience of losing her brother. She also had many settings and a tone that grabs the attention to readers that made the story more interesting, captivating and

It is obvious from the opening chapter that this novel will center on the war and the effects it has on a young group of soldiers, none of them more than twenty years of age. They are all friends and former classmates of Paul Baumer, the narrator and protagonist of the book; they have enlisted in the German infantry because their teacher, Kantorek, had painted for them a glorious picture of fighting and saving the homeland from destruction during World War I. In this first chapter, Baumer and his friends are away from the front lines, relaxing a bit after two weeks of fierce fighting. As each of the young men is introduced, it is apparent that they are tired, hungry, angry, and disillusioned over the war.

Some important highlights from the book were the motivated volunteer soldiers who risked there lives in the Civil War both Confederate and Union. Eighty to ninety percent of the fighting soldiers were volunteers. Most of them volunteered in the first year of the war. During this

Jim Murphy wrote a book called the Long Road To Gettysburg. It is a nonfiction book. It has 109 pages. The two main characters are General Robert E. Lee for the South and General Meade for the North. Other minor characters include General Joseph Hooker of the North and General John Dooley of the South. This book teaches you the Horrors of Gettysburg. The theme is violence is never the answer.

Michael Shaara’s 1974 historical novel, The Killer Angels, covers the story of the four days of the Battle of Gettysburg that also features maps for visualization. The format of the story is well organized. It begins with a Foreword, which describes in great detail the armies and soldiers involved in the battle. It follows up with four sections and within each section there are chapters that are written in chronological order, covering the events between Monday, June 29, 1863 and Friday, July 3, 1863 in different perspectives. The first to reveal their thoughts is Harrison, the Confederate spy. Harrison reports his findings about the Union to James Longstreet. As a result, Robert E. Lee decides to move his troops to Gettysburg. Meanwhile, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain proceeds to move his soldiers north. When John Buford, commander of the Union Cavalry, enters Gettysburg, he notices the Confederate infantry. Eventually, the armies clash. That was the mark of the beginning of the battle between the Union and the Confederates. Soon the rest of the Union army heard of the confrontation, so they prepared for battle. The Union and the Confederate army continued to plot plans against each other and fight for the next few days. Nonetheless, they both had their ups and downs.

I related the overall war to everyday life. Sometimes it goes smoothly and other times there are “battles”. Whether the battles are mental, physical, or emotional and if you win depends on you and how hard you are willing to push back. Sometimes you get wounded. “I was shot twice…I almost smiled, except then I started to I might die” (180). “…when I was released from the 91st Evac Hospital, they transferred me over to Headquarters Company-S-4” (182). Sometimes in life there are challenges, but eventually with determination, you can preserve and in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow” (81). I think that it’s important that you take in the little things, because that’s what life’s about. It is about taking chances and making the most out of life. Life’s about going through the struggles and hard times in order to make the good ones even better than they would’ve been

I read this book in high school, and I really enjoyed it. After we were finishing reading the book we had a guest speaker who was a Vietnam war vet come into our class and speak on different parts of the book. I picked this short story to do my paper on because I felt like I had the most connection to this story because of my prior knowledge from reading the book. I do think I am getting some parts confused with the short story and the book. I know when I read the book in high school some chapters were very dull and boring but others were exciting and interesting. After reading the short story it was just a refreshment of the interesting things that happened in the book.

War forces young soldiers to grow up quickly. In Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, Henry Fleming is no exception. He is faced with the hard reality of war and this forces him to readjust his romantic beliefs about war. Through the novel, the reader can trace the growth and development of Henry through these four stages: (1) romanticizing war and the heroic role each soldier plays, (2) facing the realities of war, (3) lying to himself to maintain his self-importance, and (4) realistic awareness of his abilities and place in life. Through Henry’s experiences in his path to self-discovery, he is strongly affected by events that help shape his ideology of war, death,