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The Minefield Poem Analysis

Decent Essays

The Minefield by Diana Thiel starts with a heartbreaking story of a young boy and his friend running between towns ends horribly when they took a short cut to find food. One of the young boys ran off ahead only to accidentally step on a landmine, taking the young boy’s life. The story was being told by a father at dinner to his family, but the father did not seem fazed by the horrific story of his friend. The narrator states throughout the poem, it seems as if the father is still living in the minefield by the anger busts and the bruises he leaves on his family. With the father’s violent outbursts and the way, the author talks about the abuse is both the father and the narrator suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The structure the author used of the poem says a lot about what the author is trying to say. As well as the words themselves. The words and the structure may cause the reader to have mixed feeling about the father throughout the poem, do you feel bad for the father for what he has been through or anger for abusing his family? After the father told the story of him and his friend the narrator explains how the traumatic experience changed his father, “He brought them with him- the minefields / He carried them underneath his good intentions/ He gave them to us- in the volume of his anger, / in the bruises we coved up with sleeves” (line 12-15). The father was so devastated by experience of the minefield, he still carries the pain and disappear with him years later. Many times, in a Post-Traumatic Stress Victim they may have acts of violence like the narrator’s father. In some cases, the person with the disorder may feel better after they talk about what had happened to them. This may be what the father is trying to do, telling the family what happened to him to cause him act out in violence. Telling the story may have help the father get passed the experience of the painful childhood memory but then why did the father not seem bothered by the telling of his story instead he simply continued eating his dinner; “My father told us this, one night, / and then continued eating dinner.” (10-11) Maybe the father promised not to be fazed by the experience or maybe the experience was one of many

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