In “War”, Pirandello uses the characters differences in perceptions to illustrate certain concepts and emotions throughout the short story. As a result of this illustration, it gives the reader a different view on each individual aspect of the story. He does not come right out and state how the changing of the character and their emotions or view play a vital role in sculpting one's new perspective of each one of these main concepts. He instead lets the reader try to infer and take in the message behind each character's action and emotion during this difficult time of war. This lets the reader develop their own themes and reasons for how the story is set up in such a way. The writing techniques used by Pirandello in “War”, such as symbols, …show more content…
Lastly, towards the end of the story, the bulky woman says, “is your son really dead?” (page 3) after this question, the fat man breaks down into mourning. This shows how some people after the death of a loved one try to put up barriers from the truth because they don’t want to believe or accept what horrible event is happening in their lives and how much their world is truly going to change. Both of these characters display different ways people try to cope with the unimaginable pain of the death of a loved one, and the various ways they try to explain why this could happen to them through their beliefs. Furthermore, in contrast to the emotions derived by death we have the emotions and understanding of the concept of love towards the characters and their family member or loved ones that have been sent off to war. For instance, this concept is can be duplicated towards the end of the story when it states, “but now the words of the traveler amazed and almost stunned her. She suddenly realized…” (page 3). This quote shows what the power of love can truly do until this point she was mourning and could not be comforted, but now that the fat man has opened her eyes she sees the love she has and will always have for her son. Moreover, towards the middle of the story each person tries to almost “top” one another in whose situation is worse, “you should thank God that
When we have strong love for others, we take risks, we go against our beliefs, we put ourselves in danger, and we let our loved ones go. Without love, there would be none of that. In this book, The Dead and the Gone, written by Susan Beth Pfeffer, a comet smashes the moon closer to earth and it creates all sorts of problems. Alex, a teenage boy with two sisters, starts a long journey of survival and risks. This story is so realistic, at times was hard to read. You start to ask yourself these tough questions, like what you would do in a specific situation. Through out the whole story, love is definitely a recurring theme. It shows you how well love can hold a family is distress together.
This quote can help to convey the recurring theme of physical and emotional burdens, along with the psychological burdens that were faced after the war. Although the characters in the book had many pieces of equipment and personal items to haul on their travels, they also had to carry their emotions. Many, if not all, of the men were holding fear,
One prominent example of this is comparing how both Tim and Mary Anne say the war makes them feel. When he is in the hospital, Tim says he “missed the adventure....of real war out in the boonies” (183). Contrasted with Mary Anne who loves how war makes her feel. She says“you can’t feel like that anywhere else” (106). The way war makes someone feel is the common strand between these two parts of the book. Tim’s experience and the way war made him feel is again repeated through Mary Anne’s character.
Along with not seeing the bigger picture soldiers lost their ordinary lives due to the war and the contrast was so different between pre and post war that it was hard to cope with life for the men fighting in the war. “For Kien, the most attractive, persistent echo of the past is the whisper of ordinary life, even though the sounds of ordinary life have been washed away by the long storms of war. It is the whispers of friends and ordinary people that are the most horrifying.”(63) The strongest emotions occur as the story unfolds and life takes over from childhood fantasies, destroying individuals and their families as a whole society is remade for instance Kien’s sweetheart before the war. Kien abandons his lover and instead spends the next years plodding through the jungle where everything dies. "no jungle grew again in this clearing. No grass, no plants" (26). He had no true friends and he learned not to fear death but rather wish it. When war ends he has a struggle to rebuild that was once loss, he can no longer see the good of things while he slowly goes insane with out love and hope and of course no sweetheart to aid him. A very sad and classical effect of a war that was worthless to its soldiers and people.
"There is no such thing as love anymore, / the kind that is so strong / that you kind of feel it in your bones. / you know we used to feel that emotion / when we looked into the faces of our mother, / father, sisters, brothers, family and friends...This novel is dedicated to the era in which we live. / The era in which love, loyalty, truth, honor, / and respect died. / Where humility and appreciation are nonexistent. / Where families are divided and God reviled, / The era. / The Coldest Winter Ever."
While I read this book, I felt scared, sad, and happy at times. Mix of emotions because this book isn’t easy to swallow, those soldiers were going through rough times. Some of these soldiers lost hope in life, a lot of them cried, and suffered. My favorite passage was “The Artillery at Hazel Grove” because it offered them hope in winning due to powerful equipment.
However, not all the change created by the war was negative. In Regret to Inform many of the wives, although they still missed their significant other, managed to take something positive from their husband’s death. The wives that refused to be stuck in the negative, were able to take a moral from their unfortunate situation, and
The psychological burden that plagues the soldiers the most is fear. The fear of death. Even though the soldiers’ experience fear at some point, showing that fear only reveals vulnerabilities to the enemy and sometimes the crueler fellow soldiers. “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing – these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.” (O'Brien, 1990) The
The reader will get an increasingly detailed image of how the soldiers emotionally respond to the happenings throughout the war due to this composition.
The horrors of war were depicted by the constant threats to the characters lives, the brutal conditions of the bad weather, hunger and combat. Soldiers had to battle the enemy along with nature. Soldiers would become stressed, paranoid and start losing their personalities. As Captain Miller says, “I just know that every man I kill, the farther away from home I feel.” This quote shows the mental toll on these soldiers.
In the essay I am going to compare and contrast the way in which different attitudes to war are presented in the poems ‘Dulce et Decorum est’. And ‘Vitai Lampada’. Both poem are a bout war but they are wrote in completely different ways.
Finally, the reader is introduced to the character around whom the story is centered, the accursed murderess, Mrs. Wright. She is depicted to be a person of great life and vitality in her younger years, yet her life as Mrs. Wright is portrayed as one of grim sameness, maintaining a humorless daily grind, devoid of life as one regards it in a normal social sense. Although it is clear to the reader that Mrs. Wright is indeed the culprit, she is portrayed sympathetically because of that very lack of normalcy in her daily routine. Where she was once a girl of fun and laughter, it is clear that over the years she has been forced into a reclusive shell by a marriage to a man who has been singularly oppressive. It is equally clear that she finally was brought to her personal breaking point, dealing with her situation in a manner that was at once final and yet inconclusive, depending on the outcome of the legal investigation. It is notable that regardless of the outcome, Mrs. Wright had finally realized a state of peace within herself, a state which had been denied her for the duration of her relationship with the deceased.
The wartime lives of the soldiers who fought in the war were in a state of mind of mixed feelings. Happiness and devastating are two adjectives that can describe the soldier’s feelings in the war because at one second they can be happy that they succeeded on a mission, but on the other hand, it can be very devastating because one of their own soldiers could have been killed during the war. Aside from physical danger losing one of your own soldiers or having your family worry about you every day and night are some negatives and unpleasant parts about fighting in a war. For example, soldiers loved ones worried each day, and hoped that they would not get a knock on their door by someone who was going to tell them that their fathers, husbands, sons, or brothers have died in the war.
The woman and man caught in their passionate embrace are set above the wartime images. It seems that symbolically the man and woman are above the war, that their love transcends the tragedy and the tumult that surrounds them, if only because they are fighting their own romantic war. Below them is a burning city. The couple on the carriage fleeing the city looks to be the same couple that is staring into each other’s eyes. This further suggests that they were apart of the events in the war, but were still caught in the throws of their own love life. The girl that rushes from her
The time periods that each text is set in varies and it is therefore interesting to note that this does not change the fundamentals, we are prepared to make sacrifices for love. All the characters were forced by restrictions of the time to make difficult decisions and in these cases they were willing to give their lives, either physically or emotionally, for their love. It shows the extremity of love, that it is worth more to these literary