How Is Hope Shown In The Hollow Men

Through “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” the soldiers standing, watching as everything goes on around them, are not able to stop what is happening. The soldiers represent the unforgiving nature of war.

(O’Brien 152). The reader is constantly second guessing themselves. This experience allows one to relate to the feeling of the soldiers, one of constant wondering, “Is this alright?” and/or “What am I fighting for?” Thus, the soldiers experiencing the paradoxical nature of war in this story is mirrored and experienced by the

The psychological effects, the mentality of fighting and killing another human, and the sheer decimation of human values is what makes war atrocious. War is not only fought on the battlefield though. This book also describes the feelings of a soldier fighting his own demons that war has brought on. The battle that the soldier has with himself, is almost if not more damaging than the physical battle of war. He will never forget his experience with battle, no matter how hard he tries the memories of artillery, blood, and death cannot be erased. “I prayed like you to survive, but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle, and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can't forget.” (Sledge). This struggle still happens to soldiers today. Sledge’s words of the struggles still captures the effects of warfare that lingers today. The other effects that war has on the men is the instability that surrounds them at every hour of the day. They are either engaged in battle having bullets and artillery fired at them, or waiting for battle just so they can be deposited back in the pressure cooker of survival. “Lying in a foxhole sweating out an enemy artillery or mortar barrage or waiting to dash across open ground under machine-gun or artillery fire defied any concept of time.”

During times of war, it is inevitable for loss to be experienced by all. In the poems “The Black Rat” and “The Photograph” written by Iris Clayton and Peter Kocan respectively, the idea of loss is explored through an omniscient narrator recalling a soldier’s involvement in warfare. While Clayton writes of a soldier’s abrupt loss of hope and how this experience negatively affects his life, Kocan explores how the loss of a loved one affects a family sixty years later. While both poems incorporate similar techniques in imagery and narration, the time setting for each poem is different as “The Black Rat” is set in Tobruk, Libya during World War 2 and “The Photograph” is set during World War 1.

The text, ‘The Things They Carried', is an excellent example which reveals how individuals are changed for the worse through their first hand experience of war. Following the lives of the men both during and after the war in a series of short stories, the impact of the war is accurately portrayed, and provides a rare insight into the guilt stricken minds of soldiers. ‘The Things They Carried' shows the impact of the war in its many forms: the suicide of an ex-soldier upon his return home; the lessening sanity of a medic as the constant death surrounds him; the trauma and guilt of all the soldiers after seeing their friends die, and feeling as if they could have saved them; and the deaths of the soldiers, the most negative impact a war

The poem starts with similar word choices as ‘The Soldier’ but written in the perspective of the mother. The mother tells his son that when he dies he will be in a place of ‘quietness’ and free from the ‘loss and bloodshed’. This reinforces the fact that the battlefield was full of horrors and death. The poem then moves onto how ‘men may rest themselves and dream of nought’ explaining that the soldiers do not have to fear for their lives after their death. This illustrates how they feared for their lives and had negative connotations.

He touches on their tragic deaths compared to their hopeful letters of going home and seeing their loved ones. He describes his astonishment as he realizes that none of these men actually showed hatred or abuse towards the German, they simply believed and had conviction in the justice behind their cause. This letter illustrates the feelings of a once happy man, now stuck at war. He says, "War hardens ones hearts and blunts ones feelings…"(p.68). This young soldier has lost all signs of the happy life he led back home. The harshness of war got to him just like the rest of the soldiers out there and if they so much as dreamed about accepting the reality around them, they would have gone either insane or surrendered and he could not give himself that luxury so onward he went.

Leaving soldiers as a shell of a human being, the torment of war is everlasting. Despite being off the battlefield, soldiers suffer from mental and physical distress long after the war is over. Soldiers have to relearn how to participate in society, and for some the impact of war destroys the concept of normal life altogether. The pain and sorrow of soldiers can be put into words through rhetorical devices. These devices, through the use of specific language, describe in detail the ways in which war physically and mentally changed soldiers. Further stressing this change, rhetorical devices reveal that once a soldier is deployed the concept of normalcy is destroyed. The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien perfectly demonstrates through

They try to build a new life, but memories from the war are still strongly obvious to them. Through the feeling of embarrassment inside the soldier, O’Brien has depicted the post-war effects of the

In “September, 1918”, Amy Lowell shows her readers an interesting and illuminating poem. That war can be an ugly time and the people that experience it often seems to live in a “broken world” (19). To fight an evil, sometimes war is needed, nonetheless it is still costly to the people living through the war. Some in a literal sense, like soldiers fighting in a war, while some in a physical sense by the world that they now see and live in. I find the poem truly interesting though, in how the author shows that even in war we can still hold onto hope for more promising days. Lowell portrays a melancholy mood throughout her poem that makes her readers thinking about war but also the hope of it being over.

​For many years war has been a huge part of history. Thousands of people go to war for their country and come back physically fine. But what people usually do not notice is the emotional distress and burden that the veterans come back with on their back. That is what drives the purpose of the book in “The things they carried”. Tim O’Brien wrote this book in way that shows how war can be part of the soldier for the rest of their life. Coming home veterans have to deal with individual sufferings, but the emotional baggage the soldiers bring also effect the people around them. The characters in the book the “The things they carried” portray this very well.

Poets frequently utilize vivid images to further depict the overall meaning of their works. The imagery in “& the War Was in Its Infancy Then,” by Maurice Emerson Decaul, conveys mental images in the reader’s mind that shows the physical damage of war with the addition of the emotional effect it has on a person. The reader can conclude the speaker is a soldier because the poem is written from a soldier’s point of view, someone who had to have been a first hand witness. The poem is about a man who is emotionally damaged due to war and has had to learn to cope with his surroundings. By use of imagery the reader gets a deeper sense of how the man felt during the war. Through the use of imagery, tone, and deeper meaning, Decaul shows us the

Striving to escape the scourge of war and to save their tortured lives, the soldiers resort to a dugout, where they are uneasily “cramped,” waiting for salvation. Imagistically, the “funnelled hole” is but the mouth of Death, which is conceived of as a predatory monster that swallows the soldiers and tightly clenches its teeth. Owen's wording continues, stating that war is hell on earth and that the soldiers get stuck “in one of many mouths of Hell,” with no way out, thus refuting any hope of salvation from this land of death. The lines, claims Stallworthy (2005, p. 102), recall Tennyson's conceptualization of death in

When faced with the countless problems of war including death, disease, sorrow, and loss, soldiers develop and intense bond between one another as they seek support in one another. A brotherhood is formed among these soldiers who rely on one another for protection and companionship amid a time in their lives where they are faced with the constant threat of death and violence everyday of their lives. But what happens to them after the war? In After the War, poet brings awareness to how the war-torn soldier attempts to reestablish their self in a society they have been isolated from for so many years through use of free verse and repetitive phrases, which further reinforces the theme throughout the poem.

The second stanza speaks of how it so often slips our mind that war does not only affect the men who are in direct combat. The young women too, suffer greatly in silence. Though so removed from the grime and blood of the battlefield, one cannot imagine the excruciating pain of having to part with their loved ones, with the knowledge that 'the holy glimmers of goodbyes ' might as well be goodbye forever. Every moment of the day, they agonize over the terrifying thought that their loved one has been shot or injured. There is no way of telling - and the guessing game is exhausting. There is no more joy or excitement in life as each 'slow dusk ' drags by, their only reason for existence condensed into a single purpose - receiving news from the battlefield. Often time, their agonizing wait ends in a heartbreaking death. This is signified from the line 'the drawing down of blinds '.