Dr. David L. Snead 's Thesis Statement

Ambrose Bierce's’ view on the military is much similar than the view of some of ours and he expresses his view throughout “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Bierce looks at the military, or even war, with an opinion of pure violence. Bierce describes the war as violent and full of suffrage. Never once does Bierce describe war as a pleasing idea.

“Which in the field developed into the finest thing that arose out of the war - comradeship,” (Remarque 27). Throughout the war, soldiers depend on each other to be able to live another day. Through small acts of kindness, sorrow from loss, and never leaving one behind emerges the theme of comradeship, which is clearly represented in the novel, All Quiet On The Western Front.”

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.

Nobody likes the war and it is really a difficult topic to write on it. Louisa May Alcott expressed her personal experience with a dying war soldier in such a beautiful way that it extract the sympathy and emotions of the audience and readers. In her excerpt “Hospital Sketches”, she writes about a young, brave and bachelor soldier named John, who participated in the civil war in 1863. She encountered him in an army hospital, while working there as a nurse. He was brought there with the fatal injuries. Using her writer’s experience, she presents an emotional retelling of an story, which advances an argument. She gets her readers emotionally involved in this narrative. By using diction, imagery, selection of details and her rhetorical

This quote in the first chapter of the book sets the overall tone. The author Tim O’Brien uses his language through out the book in an extremely straightforward manner. He does not sugar coat the way going to war and being in a war is. He does not use stories of heroes,

Memoirs of war often reflect the positive or negative experiences endured throughout battle. Considered by many to be one of the best memoirs of World War I, Hervey Allen’s “Toward the Flame”, recalls his own experiences of battle. His recollection of events shows that he had a negative image of war and that there was nothing glorious about it. What started out looking like a man’s greatest adventure turned into a shell-shocking reality that war is actually horrible and trying. Allen’s experiences with consistent hunger, mustard gas, and artillery shellings led to his disillusionment with war, and left him with a permanent hatred of battle.

20) O’Brien tells how these young men were drafted which were constantly in fear, they wished to be there obliviously but war takes up all of one’s attention; it played a big role in their life, changing their tactics, personality and becoming a new person. O’Brien uses this to show the stressful moments in war where one has pressure to be alive and in this case to fit in with everyone else and feel part of something, in a lonely place such as the war.

I read the article, “World War I as I Saw it: The Memoir of an African American Soldier.” This article consists of a memoir written by Bruce Wright and an introduction written by his grandchildren, Tracey Spencer and James Spencer. This article was published in the Massachusetts Historical Review in 2007. Before the memoir, an introduction written by Bruce Wright’s grandchildren appears. In it, they write of his personality and family, as well as a brief introduction to his life in the army. The memoir begins with Bruce stating that his company (Company L) was the only African American company in the Massachusetts National Guard. Bruce was shocked that the Colonel in charge of the regiment treated Bruce Wright’s company no different than what he treated the white companies. After moving to many different camps around Massachusetts for drill, Company L was sent to North Carolina. Here, Company L experienced ill treatment from many white soldiers. There was so much fighting between the men that soon Company L was moved to another camp. Then, at the end of March 1918, Company L set sail for France. The trip was difficult for the soldiers, with nothing but rough

The author believes that the war had a positive outcome but it was unnecessarily disturbing. The accomplishments made during the war has indeed undermined the failures, with misconstrued views. People today think this war was “The best war ever.” Adams creates a realistic picture of the war by describing the major aspects as well as topics that have little coverage to the masses. This includes; the development of teen culture, treatment of homosexuals who took part in the armed forces, minority combat during the war, the physical and mental scars, and economic reorganization of war production.

The Wars, written by Timothy Findley, is a story about World War I, and consists of many shocking images passed over to the reader. Findley accomplishes to pull the reader into the narrative itself, so that the reader manages to feel an impact upon him/her-self about what is read. If it was not for this specific skill, or can also be seen as a specific genre, the novel would not have been as successful as it is now. Also, something that helps the book be so triumphant, there is the fact that Findley never overwhelms the reader with too many gruesome details about the World War I. Instead, he breaks the book down to help the reader calm down from everything that is happening. Throughout the essay, there is going to be some commenting on a

An anti-war novel often portrays many of the bad aspects and consequences of war. Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel set in the First World War that is against war. Remarque describes the terrible reality of the war, focusing on the horrors and involved. The novel portrays an anti-war perspective as it brings up issues about the brutality of war, the narrator’s change of attitude towards war, the futility of war and the deaths of the narrator’s friends.

George, unlike the reader however, is unaware of Editha’s dishonest reasons for her support of the war and ignorantly goes off to war with the innocent belief that his girlfriend actually cares about the outcome of the war itself and not that it might potentially shape him into the man she secretly wishes he was. Howell’s use of Editha and her deceitful motives for supporting the war add a layer of realism to the story, as peoples’ motives in real life are not always pure.

WWI consumed the lives of millions. Those who lived through the war may have had only minor physical injuries or perhaps they were lucky enough to get away unharmed, but all of those who went home in the 1920s had lost an important feature in their life which was the importance of hope. The lack of hope hurt all the characters who experience the war in one way or another. Which, led to love being an empty word to the affected characters. These affected characters search for happiness in sex and in drunkenness and in superficial human relationships for the fulfillment that they were missing. Robert Cohn was about the only one who showed some kind of hope, but this hope seemed to bother the

Historians could use this diary from Lt. Fasih to compare and contrast the differences between the opposing sides of WWI, the enlisted personnel to officers, and the horrors that trench warfare had to offer in the years of the Great War. Lt. Fasih’s experience of war represents the typical officer in charge of a series of trenchs during WWI, however not so much the enlisted personnel. An enlisted persons diary would be much different given that they are not given the same privileges as officers.

The 1910s and 1920s were a time of change around the world. The death of Franz Ferdinand of Austria signaled the beginning of a large-scale war, later referred to as World War I or WWI. Many nations in Europe were involved as they had all signed pacts with each other pledging to go to war should a fellow nation be attacked. Eventually, Italy was dragged into the war, but of all of the Allied Nations, they had one of the most poorly trained and poorly equipped fighting forces (Simkin). Before 1917, Woodrow Wilson had refused to take the United States into the war, insisting the United States remain “neutral”, while on the other hand supporting the Allied forces in every way except with manpower. (The combined shock of the Zimmerman Telegram and the sinking of the Lusitania led to our true involvement in WWI.) Men looking to get into the action and get their adrenaline pumping while the US was acting “neutral” journeyed to Europe and joined other Allied armies. At the time, Ernest Hemingway was an American soldier who joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver on his quest to see the war (Ruediger). After the war, he wrote A Farewell to Arms, a self-inspired story about his experiences. Hemingway’s atypical novel, set amidst the chaos of WWI, describes a heartbreaking romance that teaches that even love cannot prevent suffering.