Theme Of Figurative Language In The Sorrow Of War

Writers used imagery as a way to show how graphic and disturbing war can be. In the poem (Doc. D) the author describes how he would be “ killing women or even watching women get killed”. This is used to show the violent and disturbing actions many people have to do while at war. Another author describes how he saw (Doc. B) someone “ yelling out, stumbling, and floundering like a man on fire”. This shows how on a daily basis many soldiers saw events that would mentally scar them. In Document D the author describes how he would have kill men and keep shooting them to make sure they were dead. This is used to show how graphic the life of war was. The use of imagery is an effective way to show how disturbing the war is.

The Vietnam war was an absolutely brutal time in American history. The war lasted for the majority of the 1960s and left many young men dead. The short story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien and the film Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam give us just a glance into the war by giving using the three themes of fear, pressures, and blame/guilt to embody the concept of war and how it absolutely changes a person. War not only destroys countries, but it destroys people.

It showed how bad he was treated by the Germans and he was treated so poorly that he was on the verge of death. He was in the verge of death no longer able to feel pain of the people he lost he is not able to feel the sadness he use to have and he wasn't scared anymore. He felt like this because he was so close to death and would have made a difference if he died because he had no reason to live anymore and the trauma that he was affected by changed him so much that he lost all of feeling of pain, sadness, and fear. I also think he used this metaphor to show the result of the concentration camps and to show his experience and also to make all readers think a little bit deeper. My second example of figurative language was “Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my god and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes” (page 34) this example of figurative language is personification.

The Vietnam War was a long conflict lasting between 1955 to 1975 between the communist North and the democratic south with help from the United States. More than 3 million people, including 58,000 American troops were killed in the conflict. Tim O 'brien 's short story “The Things They Carried” follows a platoon named alpha company during the peak of the Vietnam war led by first lieutenant Jimmy Cross who is very charismatic but in his mind he is unsure how to lead his squad because his mind tends to wander to a thought of a girl back home. Throughout the story he has overcome with emotions and guilt because he believes he his the reason for some of his squadmates death. “The Things They Carried” Embodies the hardship, reality, and price/toll of war, ultimately Tim O’brien writes this masterpiece as not of a war story, but as a love story and how that love changed a man.

The use of imagery allows the reader to picture the long-lasting emotions gripping the narrator. Being a concrete representation of an object or sensory experience (myLearning), imagery permits the reader to visualize what the narrator is experiencing. One example of imagery is used in line 5 “I'm stone. I'm flesh.” The narrator is using metaphoric and literal imagery describing his body. The reader can visualize the attempt to harden the body against the onslaught of emotion, and the reflection of the vulnerable flesh body in the granite wall. Another example of imagery can be found in lines 22 through 24 “Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's / wings cutting across my stare. / The sky. A plane in the sky." Here the realistic memories of war involuntarily flash through the narrator’s mind.

Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War is a novel that is a personal view of the Vietnam War from the perspective of a Vietnamese soldier. Like the American novel “The things they carried”, this novel brings about the effects of war on people, and especially how it defeats the human capacity for things such as love and hope. Bao Ninh offers this realistic picture of the Vietnam War’s impact on the individual Vietnamese soldier through use of a series of reminiscences or flashbacks, jumping backwards and forwards in time between the events most salient in memory, events which take on a different theme each time they are examined. His main protagonist Kien, who is basically Bao himself, looks back not just at his ten years at

To this day the Vietnam War is still considered to be one of the most devastating wars in history and has been a topic of resentment to the American culture thirty-three years after its end. For the American public it’s marked as being the point in history where distrust in our government was at an all-time high, mainly because most of the war’s carnage was witnessed on television for the first time. For all the bloodshed American and Vietnamese soldiers suffered through, the war has left a perpetual mark not only on the United States but ultimately has left a permanent scar on the soldiers who fought and managed to survive the war. Renowned war poet, Bruce Weigl, like most young American men during the time was only nineteen when he

The Viet Nam War has been the most reviled conflict in United States history for many reasons, but it has produced some great literature. For some reason the emotion and depredation of war kindle in some people the ability to express themselves in a way that they may not have been able to do otherwise. Movies of the time period are great, but they are not able to elicit, seeing the extremely limited time crunch, the same images and charge that a well-written book can. In writing of this war, Tim O'Brien put himself and his memories in the forefront of the experiences his characters go through, and his writing is better for it. He produced a great work of art not only because he experienced the war first hand, but because he is able to convey the lives around him in such vivid detail. He writes a group of fictional works that have a great deal of truth mixed in with them. This style of writing and certain aspects of the book are the topics of this reflective paper.

The Vietnam War was largely considered a failure, a waste of resources, time and precious lives. It was simply a war that did not need to be fought. But in order to combat the ever prevailing communist forces; the capitalists and in particular, America, decided that Vietnam would be the land where these differences would be disputed. Men were sent in to fight in this war and they came back with very different experiences. As seen in both perspectives held in “A Rumor of War” by Philip Caputo and in “We were soldiers once... and young” by Hal Moore and Joseph Galloway; they explore the varying perspectives and experienced seen and learnt within war. Whereas in “A Rumor of War”, it tackles the consequences of being sent into such harsh warfare, only because Philip Caputo saw the harsh reality firsthand as he was a soldier in the war. The former, “We were soldiers once... and young” tackles the glorification of war because it’s not solely a soldier’s account. A journalist was in company of these men and as such details get skewed for the public’s perception. Regardless, both these books share a telling tale of the war in Vietnam through their radically different views.

The short story that will be discussed, evaluated, and analyzed in this paper is a very emotionally and morally challenging short story to read. Michael Meyer, author of the college text The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature, states that the author of How to Tell a True War Story, Tim O’Brien, “was drafted into the Vietnam War and received a Purple Heart” (472). His experiences from the Vietnam War have stayed with him, and he writes about them in this short story. The purpose of this literary analysis is to critically analyze this short story by explaining O’Brien’s writing techniques, by discussing his intended message and how it is displayed, by providing my own reaction,

Taking place in the middle of the Cold War Era, the Vietnam War was a war not only over land but for many a battle to protect democracy and to fight communism. Much like any other account of a war, the details are gruesome and it is even more difficult to imagine. However, following the Vietnam War one author, who served in the war, decided to take up the task and make an historic account of one of them most grueling wars ever fought. Tim O’Brien is a Vietnam veteran who wrote the novel The Things They Carried. There is a fine line to be walked when writing the accounts of the war in a way that not only informs but also entertains; however, Tim O’Brien walks it successfully. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried,

The Vietnam War was a controversial conflict that plagued the United States for many years. The loss of life caused by the war was devastating. For those who came back alive, their lives were profoundly changed. The impact the war had on servicemen would affect them for the rest of their lives; each soldier may have only played one small part in the war, but the war played a huge part in their lives. They went in feeling one way, and came home feeling completely different. In the book Vietnam Perkasie, W.D. Ehrhart describes his change from a proud young American Marine to a man filled with immense confusion, anger, and guilt over the atrocities he witnessed and participated in during the war.

With the Vietnam War fresh in Le’s memory, recurring themes of the war are vivid throughout his work. As Le was growing up in California at a young age, he had little exposure to his Vietnamese culture which was eventually fed to him through American popular culture rather than his own experiences. This caused him to disassociate whether

   Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War is a contrapuntal reading to American literature on the Vietnam War. But rather than stand in stark contrast to Tim O' Brien's The Things They Carried, The Sorrow of War is strangely similar, yet different at the same time. From a post-colonialist standpoint, one must take in account both works to get an accurate image of the war. The Sorrow of War is an excellent counterpoint because it is truthful. Tim O' Brien writes: ". . . you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil." (O' Brien, 42) Bao Ninh succeeds in this respect. And it was for this reason that the Vietnamese

Bao Ninh’s novel The Sorrow of War tells a very realistic and explicit story of Kien, a North Vietnamese soldier and writer, during the Vietnam War. Kien manages to survive, usually by luck, through battles and