Essay on Tolstoy's War and Peace

War. This word stirs up an abundance of different emotions. Feelings such as fear, pain and frustration are brought to the surface. But there is also contrasting views to this topic. When someone else hears the word “war,” they may feel power, opportunity or victory. In his novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien highlights the array of emotions that war encompasses. “War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery” (O’Brien 76). This quote perfectly illustrates how many different feelings one goes through when faced with this topic. It can be concluded

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.

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

An ancient Chinese proverb states “One cannot know peace without knowing war” (Herzberg). In a time where all that plagues many nations was war, it was inevitable that a time of peace needed to follow or at least the sober idea of it. The proverb was created to validate wars and later turned into a way to approach life’s troubles. Being within an individual or on a global scale, war and peace are connected. They exist coherently but never together; they are the cause and effects of each other. One follows the other yet both are needed in order to understand the other one. This relationship between war and peace is developed in the Erich Maria Remarque's novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. While the first major world war is the background

Copious bullets, like that of torrential downpour, reign over the battlefield; a setting in which man created through dispute, engulfs each and every individual caught within it. Some are immediately spun into a downward spiral, while with others, it hits them in the midst -- even if they have built an immunity to war’s ways. Two fictional characters, both sharing a similar atmosphere, experience the true affects to war in their own ways. Although war never changes, the individuals do, no matter the situation. This is exemplified through the fictional tales, told by Liam O’Flaherty’s “The Sniper,” as well as Tim O’Brien’s “Where Have You Gone Charming Billy,” and as the main characters are to each their own story, they bear contradistinction to one another in the aspect of war, personality, and the emotional reactions to war.

Young women in particular face serious forms of abuse during this time. The author describes on multiple occasions when she was assaulted by Russian soldiers. While she describes how horrible this makes her feels, she knows that having the Russian officers around her does protect her in certain ways. She is the companion of Russian soldier by the name of Anatol. He and other soldiers

In the incredible book, All Quiet on the Western Front written by Erich Maria Remarque, the reader follows Paul Baumer, a young man who enlisted in the war. The reader goes on a journey and watches Paul and his comrades face the sheer brutality of war. In this novel, the author tries to convey the fact that war should not be glorified. Through bombardment, gunfire, and the gruesome images painted by the author, one can really understand what it would have been like to serve on the front lines in the Great War. The sheer brutality of the war can be portrayed through literary devices such as personification, similes, and metaphors.

War is often misinterpreted as an exciting occurrence filled with glory and acts of terrific heroism. In reality, it is brutal and serves as an effective simulation of hell. Timothy Findley's The Wars depicts an inhumane world where individuals are taken out of their elements and are forced to struggle to hold onto their humanity amidst the horrors. The lack of rules in war targets and destroys every aspect of what it means to be human. It heavily interferes with one's motivations, desires and purpose of living. The war also targets one's innocence and brings about suffering both physically and mentally.

As you have read war is a very different type of world everything is turned around and it confuses people. The author of the book The Things They Carried and the writer of the quote "It has been said of war that it is a world where the past has a strong grip on the present, where machines seemed sometimes to have more will power than me, where nice boys (girls) were attracted to them, where bodies ruptured and burned and stand, where the evil thing trying to kill you could look disconnecting human and where except in your imagination it was impossible to be heroic." relates to each of his stories. Wrote about war so people could have a better understanding of

The glorified act of war is often staged in historical literature by idolizing the soldiers who partake in the event. Soldiers are made to seem intrepid, ruthless and muscular, each with a ceaseless desire to fight valiantly for their countries. Timothy Findley and Kurt Vonnegut discard this typical hero archetype in their anti-war novels by portraying the soldiers who fight in the war as the men they are, not as the templates of heroes they are expected to fit, in furtherance of strengthening their anti-war stances. Findley and Vonnegut illustrate their protagonists as a tragic hero and an anti-hero, respectively, in order to juxtapose the atrocities of war with the flawed humanness of man and to challenge the stereotypical image of a

was not the truth. This book showed the harsh reality of war that most people

Throughout time humanity has relentlessly found a reason to tear itself apart. The slaughter of man is read about almost every day and one never thinks twice about it; however, when the lackluster conditions of others’ lives throughout time is conveyed via a novel or movie, we are forced to delve into the lives of those who fought tirelessly for their beliefs – even if “their beliefs” are not correlated to their own. Prime exemplum of soldiers fighting for differing causes is and attempting to save the sliver of humanity remaining is demonstrated by Paul Bäumer in “All Quiet on the Western Front,” by Erich Maria Remarque and Lieutenant Hans von Witzland in Stalingrad. While both protagonists die in the end of their works and suffer brutal warfare, their attempts to transcend the dehumanization of war may be one of the few reasons that the characters survived as long as they did.

“I think it [war] is more of a kind of fever. No one in particular wants it, and then all at once there it is. We didn’t want the war, the others say the same thing- and yet half the world is in it all the same. (206)” Erich Remarque describes how war is an odd sort of happening through Albert Kropp, one of the most intelligent young men of Paul Bäumer’s company. Remarque, himself a German World War 1 veteran, uses the characters of Paul’s company to channel his frustrations from his experiences during the war. The vivid imagery used to describe bombardments and life at the front allows the reader to visualize the reality of warfare. It’s bloody, messy, and repulsive. Extreme detail aids Remarque in exposing the atrocities of war, and its repercussions. All Quiet on the Western Front focuses on an anti-war theme, and how war itself has no purpose other than to be savage and wasteful.

World War was often known as the war to end all wars. This was the nickname given to this conflict due to ferocity and enormous casualties. The damage done during the time period left a dent in society as it harmed millions psychologically, emotionally and physically. This dent resulted in a post-war era filled with numerous literary pieces expressing the toll of war on a person. A perfect example is the novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, and the poem, “Piano after War” where they convey philosophical ideas resulting from brutal conflict. Despite Remarque’s novel and Brook’s poem having similar themes, the authors differ in the way they reveal these themes.

In this essay, I will discuss how Tim O’Brien’s works “The Things They Carried” and “If I Die in a Combat Zone” reveal the individual human stories that are lost in war. In “The Things They Carried” O’Brien reveals the war stories of Alpha Company and shows how human each soldier is. In “If I Die in a Combat Zone” O’Brien tells his story with clarity, little of the dreamlike quality of “Things They Carried” is in this earlier work, which uses more blunt language that doesn’t hold back. In “If I Die” O’Brien reveals his own personal journey through war and what he experienced. O’Brien’s works prove a point that men, humans fight wars, not ideas. Phil Klay’s novel “Redeployment” is another novel that attempts to humanize soldiers in war. “Redeployment” is an anthology series, each chapter attempts to let us in the head of a new character – set in Afghanistan or in the United States – that is struggling with the current troubles of war. With the help of Phil Klay’s novel I will show how O’Brien’s works illustrate and highlight each story that make a war.