Character Analysis: The Sorrow Of War

Without the war Kiowa would’ve still been alive, the soldiers’ wouldn’t be blaming one another, and no one would be depressed. The war has now damaged the majority of the soldiers’ emotionally. You can blame everyone and everything else but you will come to the conclusion that the war takes the fault. You can eliminate one feature of the war at a time and see that the death of Kiowa would’ve still occurred. The war caused Kiowa to be there at that very moment.

Sometimes people read a text and do not go any further into the message inside. Howeverin the story A Separate Peace by John Knowles, The character of Finny represents innocence-aninnocence that is destroyed when it is forced to confront the hatred and evil in the real world.Finny is preserved by most as a picture of innocence because he acts like he has nothingto hide from anyone. The reader can infer this because, most of the teachers at Devon seem tothink of him this all good boy way. The reason the reader thinks this is because, they let the stuffthat Finny does, that is against the rules, slide and he does not get in any form of trouble.However when anyone else at Devon done these things they do not let them off as easy. Thisbeing because of the fact that Finny had a certain attitude towards life that made people not seethe bad in him.However later in the novel Finny falls from the tree and

“ His Expression remained the same- cynical, defiant, painful” (Gaines 84). Miss Emma did not think that Jefferson knew he was going to be put in the chair, which kind of furthers this whole idea that everyone has that’s he’s incompetent. Even his own aunt without realizing has degraded him. I think that maybe Jefferson can’t read or write but he’s a human who understands laws. At the beginning of the book I was feeding into the notion that he was mentally challenged, but I think now that he just grew up in the uneducated black stigma put on him by white people not letting black school have the same education. And so he knows he is going to die, he doesn’t fight he doesn’t resist he faces the unjust punishment with grace and is going o let

Along with not seeing the bigger picture soldiers lost their ordinary lives due to the war and the contrast was so different between pre and post war that it was hard to cope with life for the men fighting in the war. “For Kien, the most attractive, persistent echo of the past is the whisper of ordinary life, even though the sounds of ordinary life have been washed away by the long storms of war. It is the whispers of friends and ordinary people that are the most horrifying.”(63) The strongest emotions occur as the story unfolds and life takes over from childhood fantasies, destroying individuals and their families as a whole society is remade for instance Kien’s sweetheart before the war. Kien abandons his lover and instead spends the next years plodding through the jungle where everything dies. "no jungle grew again in this clearing. No grass, no plants" (26). He had no true friends and he learned not to fear death but rather wish it. When war ends he has a struggle to rebuild that was once loss, he can no longer see the good of things while he slowly goes insane with out love and hope and of course no sweetheart to aid him. A very sad and classical effect of a war that was worthless to its soldiers and people.

Question: Rewrite your Martin Guerre essay with relevance to whether the ideologies of society if being reinforced or challenged; make sure to mention in respect to the book’s context, contemporary society and your own context.

The outcome of war can distort a person completely, not just physically due to injuries, but also mentally and emotionally as the character Rat Kiley from The Things They Carried experienced. Kiley had been injured and

Many of the wives talked about the letter their husband/boyfriend sent home, and their inability to talk about anything other than the "weather". One particular wife stood out though for her husband's story. She said he husband left her a simple note that read “I love you sweetheart, but I can't take the flashbacks", before he went in to the garage and killed himself. In this case, it is obvious that whatever the soldier witnessed in Vietnam greatly affected him. He was unable to take seeing the atrocities that he witnessed in Vietnam anymore, he was willing to go to the extreme of taking his own life- dismantling not only his own life, but also his whole families- just to avoid seeing the visions anymore. This would lead many to assume that events the soldiers saw were horrific, and continued to affect them even after they had already returned home. One soldiers wife said "he lost his soul in Vietnam but it took 7 years for his body to catch up", soldiers were dehumanized by the things they had to in Vietnam and this cause them to "die" even though their hearts were still technically beating.

Many people have their own definition of evil. In the dictionary the definition is profoundly immoral and malevolent. My personal definition of evil is putting your needs before others, hurting someone or making their life miserable just so you have a better advantage to succeeding in your life. “A Separate Peace” is about a boy named Gene Forrester who returns to his school called the Devon school. He attended the school when he was young during World War II. Gene is a hardworking student who is devoted to his studies. Finny on the other hand, is terrible at schoolwork but is a tremendous athlete. In my point of view Gene is a ruthless evil person.

He obviously went into a moment of shock, and after this he will not be the same. The way this event affected him proves that psychologically he has been changed. According to psychological expert on war and the effects it leaves on people, Stan Tian:

I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while. Much of it is hard to remember. I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words and watch Kiowa sinking into the deep muck of a shit field, or Curt Lemon hanging in pieces from a tree, and as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening. Kiowa yells at me. Curt Lemon steps from the shade into bright sunlight, his face brown and shining, and then he soars into a tree. The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over. (O’Brien 31)

This passage elucidates the ending of Robert’s state of heartache and continuous thoughts about his sister’s death, Rowena, that are clouding up his mind in the novel The Wars. After the long period of sadness that is surrounding Robert ever since his beloved sister’s death, why did he go ahead and burn his only picture of Rowena so simply if he has been clinging onto her memory for so long? Robert does take initiative and destroys the only thing that he has left of Rowena; however, it is indeed for a worthy cause, and according to Findley, “an act of charity” instead of an “act of anger”. The charity that Findley notes of alludes to Robert himself than Rowena. From burning the photograph of his sister, he is releasing the guilt he has been

Bao Ninh's portrayal of postwar Vietnam also fosters a more objective viewpoint of the war. After the war, the Americans took their twisted memories back home, to an unscathed country where nearly everyone had something to go back to. For North Vietnamese soldiers, home was where the horror had been, and in many ways still was. He is plain in his message: "The recent years of war had brought enough suffering and pain to last them a thousand years." (75) Kien's slow, painful demise is brought on by the heavy sorrow of war as he is haunted by an "eternal past." (88) During the war North Vietnamese soldiers were but "insects or an ant" who

Kien mentions multiple times throughout the novel the desensitizing effect the war has had on not just his personality and emotions, but his entire life. Kien reminiscences about his youth when he was still capable of love, saying it “was now hard to imagine, hard to remember a time when his whole personality and character had been intact, a time before the cruelty and destruction had warped his soul” (Ninh, 30).

When asked how he felt about the deaths of 9 /11, Pablo Sequera , a 22 year old US army soldier in Iraq said "I wanted to bomb the fuck out of every single one of them towel heads". Now fighting in Iraq he says he has grown more sympathy and understanding toward Middle Eastern people. "Actually being up close, watching how they live every day in violence, has given me even more ambition to help them gain freedom" said Sequera. War will always change a person whether it's physically or mentally, a soldier never leaves the way he came in. The smells of gunfire, the loud ping of bullets bouncing off of metal, the vibrations of grenades exploding nearby, and the taste of their own fear climbing up into their throat will always remain close to

Devil on the Cross by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o is a compelling and curious novel that examines both the physical and mental journey of a young woman, Wariinga. Along the way she encounters many people and challenges that shape her identity.