George Phraner Analysis

”At the time of the attack I was in my room shaving. The word was passed "Away Fire and Rescue Party;" just as I was leaving my room the second word was passed for all hands to man their General Quartets Stations closely followed by a shock of a hit. I glanced at my clock as I was leaving my room and noticed the time was a few minutes before 8:00 A.M. I started for my station in Radio Central; as I was passing along the third deck up a port ammunition passageway, I felt two more hits. The lights went out in the passageway except for one battle light and two panel lights in the boat crane machinery space. By the time I reached the compartment abreast the armory the ship had picked up a ten to fifteen list to port; there were a couple of battle lights on in this compartment. Water and oil were bubbling up along the junction of the bulkhead and deck of the electrical work shop, port side”(D.L. Westfall)

Beginning my love of reading an early age, I was never the type of child who was drawn to fictional stories. As an 8 year-old child in West Virginia, I was recognized by the local library for my love of biographies, autobiographies and recollections of world events. This love has continued throughout my adult life, desiring to read novels such as “We Were Soldiers Once…and Young” by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore rather than watch the major motion picture “We Were Soldiers” starring Mel Gibson. Even though the motion picture received multiple awards, when reading the recollection of Mr. Moore’s accounts, the feeling of loss, distress, anxiety and fear can be felt in each word that he has written while reliving this horrendous war.

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.

the reader to join him in his vivid description of what life as a soldier

. . . Like I was losing myself, everything spilling out” (O’Brien 202). Provided with only laconic, expository definitions, an audience cannot truly feel the pains of war. O’Brien utilizes descriptions which evoke all the senses and submerge the audience in the unique and powerful sensations of war. Witnessing war’s pains through the familiar tactile crunch of an ornament or the splash of liquid spilling, the audience can immediately understand the inconceivable pressure placed on the soldier’s injured body. O’Brien continues, “All I could do was scream. . . . I tightened up and squeezed. . . . then I slipped under for a while” (203). His abrupt syntax and terse diction conveys a quickness to these events. Not bothering with extraneous adornment, his raw images transport the audience to the urgency of the moment and the severity of the pain. Now supplied with an eyewitness’s perspective of war’s injuries, the audience can begin to recognize the significance of the suffering. O’Brien tells his audience, “Tinny sounds get heightened and distorted. . . . There was rifle fire somewhere off to my right, and people yelling, except none of it seemed real anymore. I smelled myself dying” (203). In the same frame, O’Brien paints the rumbling chaos of the big war juxtaposed with the slow death of the small individual. His description emphasizes the purposeless discord and confusion of war and seeks to condemn its disorder. He argues that war’s lack of

Just as he was halfway down the spiraling wooden staircase of the lighthouse he heard a muffled, “Mayday, mayday, mayday!”. Could it be? Am I imagining this? Without skipping a beat, he bolted back up the stairs, feeling something go out in his hip, disregarding his injury, he plopped back into his worn out armchair and picked up the microphone. Trying to mask his kid like excitement, he mustered up an authoritative voice and answered back, “This is coast guard Ogden Hall, please state your emergency,

It scared me stiff… It was the turning point for me.  I began to see what people were really capable of doing…” In addition to fear,  author William Golding perceived the bane of the boys’ predicament on the island as the manifestation of war and its traumatic effects. “ There was a sudden bright explosion and corkscrew trail across the  sky, then darkness again and stars.” At one moment on the island, the boys witnessed a parachutist descending from an aircraft shot and killed mid-air, further demoralizing their detainment. (Document D) If the war was overwhelming for a member of the Royal Navy, one can only imagine the extent of anguish it brought a group of school

This passage is an extract from Joseph O’ Connor’s Star of the sea which was penned in the year 2002. The passage makes use of a third person narrative view point as a result of which the readers are provided with a vivid image of passengers aboard a stormy sea ship. The passage talks about a ship afloat a stormy sea and how the passengers on the deck are caught unaware due to this storm. The author uses a descriptive style of writing with short crisp sentences that heighten the pace of the story. In the last two paragraphs however, the author uses longer sentences that signal a slower pace and show the readers that the storm has died down for the time being. The author has interspersed the action with 2 dialogues. It is interesting to

In this book, Tim O’brien reveals all his experiences in detail about the war; as well as stories about his fellow soldiers, and makes a true, but over the top about them. He explains how he feels through stories that are difficult to clearly identify as “true.” This book has a lot of themes, death and violence is one of the major themes.

Almost as a stenographer reading back to someone in a courtroom. O’ Brien places himself simply at the scene, taking note of everything, witnessing everything, with a straight face. Through his unmoved diction such as “He fell hard,” noticing that blood came up like water “from a pump,” (62). This way of forming sentences in reactions to what he’s seeing reminds readers of what they do when they watch a video of something horrible happening that doesn’t affect them first hand. A tone of feeling bad, but not affected personally. Maybe more bothered blood than what had actually happened. This was his brother, and the way he describes the events is utterly scary to the readers because the lack of emotion. O’Brien did this to get his point across. To describe a way soldiers remember stories such as these. As just a physical feature of the scene. There was nothing his platoon felt they could do except “ Wait for the dustoff,” (63). In this line that he writes, he reveals the different levels of relief felt in war and in life. First the relief that Lee felt. Although cruel, he was relieved of his duty in the war and in life, and this is a major theme of life. Once we pass, we face moments of only peace and are relieved of all the problems that come with the world. He reveals a second level of relief that contradicts the first one. Underlying relief of the fellow soldier that it wasn’t their turn to finalize their life story. Through his eventful tone he reveals the last level of relief. The one felt in this scenario by Dave, but one he claims that readers have felt before. The relief of a duty. Lee passed on the way to the medics so Dave never had to decide which promise he would live up to; The decision was made for him, and the factual diction of the chapter exemplifies this because of the way O'Brien simply list facts.

Paragraph 89 contains deceptively simple events which are very powerful. Shells are thrown by the enemy on the bay causing a “concussion” to the earth meaning the ground is shaking strongly. Since the earth is shaking, it rolls him over to his back as he suddenly sees the calm and peaceful shining stars in the sky during the war. Then another bomb is thrown to the same place as the stars start to move in circular motion. The stars are not actually moving in circular motion because it is him being tossed in the air so he sees all the stars

After O’Brien subconsciously tossed a grenade at a young soldier that killed the man, he absorbed in a state of shock and guilt upon examining the body. Unlike other passages where the author left the overall picture to our imagination, he emphasized the true sight of the young man providing the reader with meticulous descriptions of the injuries in this chapter. For example, through the eyes of O’Brien, he began by noticing the most distinct feature, the jaw lodged in his throat. Then, as if he was following O’Brien’s trail of sight, he proceeded to focus upwards, describing the mouth, the eyes, and finally the hair. Thus far, even though his statements were too detailed to be “true,” O’Brien seemed calm and composed. However, as the author’s

A great example of this is on page 235, “When Steele and his men had first moved into the courtyard it was bedlam. The noise was relentless: shooting, grenade blasts, helicopter rotors, radio call, men shouting, crying, groaning, screaming back and forth, trying to be heard over the din, each one’s needs more urgent than the next man’s. There was smoke and gunpowder and dust in the air. Poor Lieutenant Lecher was bleeding a river from his shattered right leg and bellowing with pain.”

It is similar, for the exception that in one they are on the ship in which the shelling occurs, versus simply being a bystander. It shows how `fire happy' these men were ready to fight and kill without a motive.