Luigi Pirandello's War

1. Write a precise, well-developed sentence that states as fully as possible the theme of the story. Remember to avoid clichés or oversimplification.

While the young men at the ages of eighteen to twenty signed up for the war they believed that they were going to have a well off time, meanwhile the older generation is betraying them. The men that came before them do not tell them they are going to see there best friend shot to pieces. Also that they are going to be stuck for days in tiny trenches running out of food because then they would get the bodies to

Even though the soldiers join the war as naive youths, the war rapidly changes them and they develop into young men. Surrounded by death, the boys are bound to foresee the fragility of their own lives and are stripped of the carelessness and brazenness of youth. The dreadful horrors around the boys bound them to consider a world that does not accommodate to their childish and simplistic view. They want to only see a separation between what is right and what is wrong, they instead find moral doubt. Where they had wanted to see order and meaning, they only found senselessness and disorder. Where they wanted to find heroism, they only found the selfish instinct of self-preservation. These realizations destroyed the innocence of the boys, maturing and thrusting them into their manhood.

In the incredible book, All Quiet on the Western Front written by Erich Maria Remarque, the reader follows Paul Baumer, a young man who enlisted in the war. The reader goes on a journey and watches Paul and his comrades face the sheer brutality of war. In this novel, the author tries to convey the fact that war should not be glorified. Through bombardment, gunfire, and the gruesome images painted by the author, one can really understand what it would have been like to serve on the front lines in the Great War. The sheer brutality of the war can be portrayed through literary devices such as personification, similes, and metaphors.

The war had changed people in so many ways, as their former character of being sincere, at peace, and loving was slowly changed to chaotic, indecisive and unhopeful lives. People began to forget who they really were all due to the war, “It

Themes include major topics such as love, war, life, death, family, and often convey the moral of the story, or a life lesson. Sometimes readers will misunderstand the topic of the story with the theme. The topic is a summary of what the story is about and the theme is the overall message about the topic. A successful author should know that a story should never lack a theme because the theme is what stays in every reader’s mind, even after forgetting the details of the story.

brilliantly brings out this theme through the use of setting and atmosphere, the title of the story and its

The author writes of many different human beings, showing that each one thinks war is ultimately, the worst thing. While in the war, Billy is in the hospital during his imprisonment by the Germans. There is an old general there who was a teacher before joining in the war efforts. One day, in a conversation with Billy and another older man in the hospital, the general starts to talk about what he thinks of the war. He says, "You know-- we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. "‘My God, my God----’ I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade’" (p. 106). This general feels that war is nothing but babies being murdered by one another. He is disturbed by the thought of war and the fact that so many young people are dying for its cause.

As an author establishes the characters he simultaneously attempts to develop the theme of the story. An author uses various elements such as point of view, the setting, and symbols to work toward the expression of one central idea. In looking at "A Rose for Emily." a short story by William Faulkner, it is evident that Faulkner successfully carries one main idea throughout the piece, the idea of being isolated from society.

War has been a terrible driving force throughout history. One can come to the conclusion that war is a gruesome experience that causes one to become blinded by anger, regret their actions, and feel immense amounts of sorrow for and towards others. The works of literature written by Erich Maria Marque, Thomas Hardy, and Denise Levertov help to shed light on these horrors of war.

In this essay, I will discuss how Tim O’Brien’s works “The Things They Carried” and “If I Die in a Combat Zone” reveal the individual human stories that are lost in war. In “The Things They Carried” O’Brien reveals the war stories of Alpha Company and shows how human each soldier is. In “If I Die in a Combat Zone” O’Brien tells his story with clarity, little of the dreamlike quality of “Things They Carried” is in this earlier work, which uses more blunt language that doesn’t hold back. In “If I Die” O’Brien reveals his own personal journey through war and what he experienced. O’Brien’s works prove a point that men, humans fight wars, not ideas. Phil Klay’s novel “Redeployment” is another novel that attempts to humanize soldiers in war. “Redeployment” is an anthology series, each chapter attempts to let us in the head of a new character – set in Afghanistan or in the United States – that is struggling with the current troubles of war. With the help of Phil Klay’s novel I will show how O’Brien’s works illustrate and highlight each story that make a war.

There are themes in every piece of fictional literature ever written. A theme is the central idea of a story that is fictional. A theme can be everything from good verse evil to as simple as light and darkness. In any story there may be more than one theme in it. Some stories have numerous central ideas that can be seen in the one. Most people only focus on one while there may be five that are important to understand to understand the story. The Tell-Tale Heart like some has numerous themes that are all important to understanding the story.

Death is inevitable in every person’s life, but death in these character’s lives is easily predicted to be early, and this represents the sadness and sorrows in the innocence of war. There are many ways to die, and war is the saddest way for that to occur, but at the same time,

Biography: Luigi Pirandello, born in Sicily, Italy in 1867, was one of Italy's most famous playwrights and modern authors. He became interested in literature at a very young age and wrote his first play at the age of twelve. His father, however, enrolled him in a technical school but that changed almost instantly as he transferred to an academic secondary school to study oratory and literature. He did agree to marry his father's business partners' daughter, Antoinetta Portulano. He then earned his doctorate in Romance literature, married, and moved to Rome, where he began publishing his short stories and poems. In 1903, Pirandello suffered a terribly financial devastation as his family's sulfur mine was destroyed.

The short story is a concise form of narrative prose that is usually simpler and more direct compared to longer works of fiction such as novels. Therefore, because of their short length, short stories rely on many forms of literary devices to convey the idea of a uniform theme seen throughout the script. This theme is illustrated by using characteristics that are developed throughout the story such as, plot, setting and characters. The three main components are developed throughout the story in order to guide the reader to the underlying theme, which is necessary as a short story lacking a theme also lacks meaning or purpose.