Moon Is Down Quotes

The topic of war is hard to imagine from the perspective of one who hasn't experienced it. Literature makes it accessible for the reader to explore the themes of war. Owen and Remarque both dipcik what war was like for one who has never gone through it. Men in both All Quiet on the Western Front and “Dulce Et Decorum” experience betrayal of youth, horrors of war and feelings of camaraderie.

99) Along with other narrators, Bromberg has “little to report about the next phase [1932 through the beginning of World War II] until they are directly affected by the war through military conscription or Allied bombing raids on their home town” (Bessel, p. 101). Herbert’s recurring theme is that “’Quiet’, ‘normal’ times, then, clearly leave behind few experiences that are imprinted on the memory and recalled in the narratives; ‘disturbed’, ‘bad’ times are filled with unique and extraordinary experiences, and come up at corresponding length in the life stories” (Bessel, p. 101).

In 1958, Elie Wiesel wrote a book called “Night.” The main idea of the literary memoir was to convey his experience at the Nazi concentration camps with his father. However, because this is an autobiography of Elie Wiesel there is possible author bias. However the narrator is not Elie, but Eliezer a fictionalized version of himself. Since the point of view is from Elie Wiesel’s experience in the concentration camps there are examples of bias. “Night” contains many facts about how the SS soldiers took the Jewish people to concentration camps and how they were treated.

Kurt Vonnegut is able to put a man’s face on war in his short story, “All the King’s Horse ”, and he exemplifies that in a time of war, the most forgotten effect on nations is the amount of innocent lives lost in meaningless battle due to unjust rulers fighting each other against a nation’s will. As Americans, we are oblivious to the fact that we have people fighting every day for our country. In addition, we ignore the fact that we do a lot of collateral damage and hurt innocent people unintentionally in order to get what we want. Vonnegut shows the reader in Pi Ying’s own sadistic way of demonstrating how he feels about war brings attention to the point that war, while unruly and cruel, is nothing

1. “In any war story, especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told the way. “ (71)

Between memoirs and history textbooks, two very different approaches to historical matters are dealt with: one appeals to emotion, while the other to reason and logic. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, he discusses his life during the Holocaust and what life in a prison camp was like on an emotional level. The treatment of the Jews at the hands of the Nazi guards is more appalling through the emotional description of a survivor like Elie Wiesel than through the contextual and fact based evidence found in a textbook. One such example of this is when Wiesel describes how when the Jews were herded onto the cattle carriages to move them from Geiwitz to Buchenwald, and how the Nazi’s distribution of rations led to the Jews eating snow off one another’s backs:

O’Brien’s unification of fact and fiction is to illustrate the idea in which the real accuracy of a war story is less significant than storytelling. The subjective truth about what the war meant and what it did to change the soldiers is more meaningful than the technical details of the

Penned during two distinctly disparate eras in American military history, both Erich Maria Remarque's bleak account of trench warfare during World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Tim O'Brien's haunting elegy for a generation lost in the jungles of Vietnam, The Man I Killed, present readers with a stark reminder that beneath the veneer of glorious battle lies only suffering and death. Both authors imbue their work with a grim severity, presenting the reality of war as it truly exists. Men inflict grievous injuries on one another, breaking bodies and shattering lives, without ever truly knowing for what or whom they are fighting for. With their contributions to the genre of war literature, both Remarque and O'Brien have sought to lift the veil of vanity which, for so many wartime writers, perverts reality with patriotic fervor. In doing so, the authors manage to convey the true sacrifice of the conscripted soldier, the broken innocence which clouds a man's first kill, and the abandonment of one's identity which becomes necessary in order to kill again.

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.

The quote, “Don’t judge a man until you’ve Walked Two Moons in his moccasins” ~(Creech)~. The quote typed above demonstrates a powerful theme in the novel which shows through each of the characters. This is a theme that is placed many times in the novel, and the author makes it important. During the book, Walk Two Moons, Sal changes from upset to accepting which is demonstrated by the changes in her life, the definition of character, and the events that happen for a reason.

It is obvious from the opening chapter that this novel will center on the war and the effects it has on a young group of soldiers, none of them more than twenty years of age. They are all friends and former classmates of Paul Baumer, the narrator and protagonist of the book; they have enlisted in the German infantry because their teacher, Kantorek, had painted for them a glorious picture of fighting and saving the homeland from destruction during World War I. In this first chapter, Baumer and his friends are away from the front lines, relaxing a bit after two weeks of fierce fighting. As each of the young men is introduced, it is apparent that they are tired, hungry, angry, and disillusioned over the war.

War is a dangerous game, many people would likely agree to this, however, very few have ever seen a battlefront. The truth is that war, no matter how awful we can imagine it, is always exponentially worse. In Timothy Findley’s The Wars, Robert Ross, the protagonist,­ faces a situation that he finds difficult to come to terms with, and when faced with a similar situation later on in the novel, he must take drastic measures to reconcile the uncertainties of the past situation. Timothy Findley suggests, through the life of Robert Ross, that one’s need to reconcile the uncertainties of past experiences dominate our actions when such situations come up again in our lives. In the words of Hiram Johnson, a US Senator during the First World War,

As long as there has been war, those involved have managed to get their story out. This can be a method of coping with choices made or a way to deal with atrocities that have been witnessed. It can also be a means of telling the story of war for those that may have a keen interest in it. Regardless of the reason, a few themes have been a reoccurrence throughout. In ‘A Long Way Gone,’ ‘Slaughterhouse-Five,’ and ‘Novel without a Name,’ three narrators take the readers through their memories of war and destruction ending in survival and revelation. The common revelation of these stories is one of regret. Each of these books begins with the main character as an innocent, patriotic soldier or civilian and ends in either the loss of innocence and regret of choices only to be compensated with as a dire warning to those that may read it. These books are in fact antiwar stories meant not to detest patriotism or pride for one’s country or way of life, but to detest the conditions that lead to one being so simpleminded to kill another for it. The firebombing of Dresden, the mass execution of innocent civilians in Sierra Leone and a generation of people lost to the gruesome and outlandish way of life of communism and Marxism should be enough to convince anyone. These stories serve as another perspective for the not-so-easily convinced.

In writing The moon is Down, Steinbeck demonstrated a blatant disregard for his country’s views on the Nazi’s invasion of many European countries. Whilst Americans considered everything that was in alliance will Hitler and everyone under him to be evil, Steinbeck wrote The Moon is Down based off the truth, that every Nazi soldier, was just that, a solider, only man, many only boys, not demons, not heroes but innocent humans forced into orchestrating terrible evil. The desire to fight, to defend and to protect is a characteristic intrinsic to human nature. Regardless of the commotion this topic raises, war, is not a contemporary idea, it is in fact as ancient as the human race itself. Throughout history, thriving civilizations have been established

Everyone is familiar with the state of armed conflict that is war, and for as long as there has been civilization there has been war. Upon first glance, Henry David Thoreau’s “The Battle of the Ants” seems like a simple descriptive story of a battle between two different species of ants, one red and one black, but if one were to further inspect the text, they could see that Thoreau uses the ants and their battle as a satirical allegory for human conflict. Thoreau chooses to use ants as a metaphor to make it clear to the reader that war is futile, pointless, and a waste of life.