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The Good Soldiers By David Finkel

Decent Essays
The Good Soldiers Paper
In David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, Finklel details different versions of the war in Iraq. Over the years, the image of war portrayed through literature has changed. Looking at non-fiction wartime novels of the past, the image of war was completely different. The novels of the past focused much more on the aftermath of war and the survivors of war, rather than the actual war it’s self like in today’s novels. When novels of the past did feature scenes of war, the details used to describe the scenes were not as vivid as they are today. I attribute this change to the change of style in which narrative pieces of non-fiction are written. After Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was published in 1966, the landscape of the non-fiction narrative completely changed, thus the wartime books published after this also changed. In addition to that, the advancement in technology has also changed the way wartime novels are written. Today, society can go on YouTube and watch videos of the war. There is also more media present on the battlefield than there was in the past. Having access to actual footage of the ongoing war, the public knows what the war looks like. With that in mind, authors can portray the realities of war because they already know the public has some sense of what the battlefield already looks like.
In Hiroshima, John Hershey describes the aftermath of the dropping of the atomic bomb by following the lives of six survivors of the bomb following the
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