Wallace Stevens' Poem 'The Death of a Soldier' and William Faulkner's Story 'Two Soldiers': A Comparative Analysis

Through “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” the soldiers standing, watching as everything goes on around them, are not able to stop what is happening. The soldiers represent the unforgiving nature of war.

Nobody likes the war and it is really a difficult topic to write on it. Louisa May Alcott expressed her personal experience with a dying war soldier in such a beautiful way that it extract the sympathy and emotions of the audience and readers. In her excerpt “Hospital Sketches”, she writes about a young, brave and bachelor soldier named John, who participated in the civil war in 1863. She encountered him in an army hospital, while working there as a nurse. He was brought there with the fatal injuries. Using her writer’s experience, she presents an emotional retelling of an story, which advances an argument. She gets her readers emotionally involved in this narrative. By using diction, imagery, selection of details and her rhetorical

This is the poem that Jim Northrup wrote about war. I am going to Explicate the poem and

The poem was written to show that war is a waste of human life as the soldier knows he will die one day as well as the men around him, just some quicker than others. This can be evident in stanza four of the poem: “I know I’ll join them somewhere, one day.” The language used is more casual than formative, this is effective as it shows the personal feelings and thoughts of the soldier during the time

“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell is able to accomplish so many thing with so little lines-mainly through the use of metaphor and diction. It explains the terrors of wars in gruesome detail and explains the ways in which wars, in a sense “breed” and “birth” death. To some, this poem is seen as the ultimate poem of war, and rightly

The poem starts with similar word choices as ‘The Soldier’ but written in the perspective of the mother. The mother tells his son that when he dies he will be in a place of ‘quietness’ and free from the ‘loss and bloodshed’. This reinforces the fact that the battlefield was full of horrors and death. The poem then moves onto how ‘men may rest themselves and dream of nought’ explaining that the soldiers do not have to fear for their lives after their death. This illustrates how they feared for their lives and had negative connotations.

“A war is not over when a war is over ” Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse Five is about Billy Pilgrim a College dropout who joined the army. It is world war two and Billy Pilgrim is deployed in Germany, he is captured and taken as a prisoner of war. Hemingway's short story “soldier's home” is about herald kerb a soldier that is returning home from the vietnam war. During the war billy and krebs were both heros, but when they return home the true trauma of war set in. Transforming them into anti-hero. Both Billy and kerb function as anti-heroes because there heroic qualities are suppressed. Thesis lack courage, do not have any direction, and they suffer from survivor guilt.

Louisa May Alcott narrates in the Death of a Soldier about the death of John, the soldier, and the commotion that is happening around him as he departs. Alcott’s narrative explains the difficulty of soldiers actions and emotions during warfare. The narrative starts off with the release that John is going to die. Later, Alcott illustrates the reason why soldiers react with a certain affection during the deathbed of a wounded soldier. The whole narrative of Louisa May Alcott argues about the compassion of a soldier during warfare and its acceleration for the contraction of harshness experienced frightfully in time of war.

As Tim O’Brien states in his short story book, The Things They Carried, the only true thing about war is its allegiance to evil and obscenity. One example of this faithfulness war has to stick to its truth is the inevitable death of many soldiers. War consumes. It consumes a large amount of resources, money, energy, time, but most of all it consumes human lives. The ones who don’t pass must bear the witness of the death of the others. “In the Field”, one of the short stories in O’Brien’s book, explores the way death is handled by soldiers and the process by which absorb the emotions that come along with it.

War is something that is hard to forget. War can change someone forever. In a war, people see each other die and that is hard to forget. A literary example of a story that demonstrates the effects of war is "The Things They Carried" by Tim O' Brien. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross is busy looking at a picture of Martha and one of his men dies because of him. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross burns everything that is related to Martha and tries to lead his men to survival. Based on the use of characterization and symbolism in "The Things They Carried", Tim O' Brien argues that war forces people to abandon their attachment to people they care about in order to survive.

The poet Wilfred Owen was one of many poets who were against war. He reflected this idea of anti-war in his poems, one of his poems called “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, mirrors most aspects of war all put together in this short still deep poem. An example of that would be when the speaker stated,” What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”(1) The speaker asks is there any sound that marks our soldier’s death other than the sounds of church bell’s which are mostly rung to represent somebody’s absence? Clearly, the speaker sets anger as the tone of the poem through this question to show that soldier’s death is unremarkable.. The speaker compares the soldiers to a “cattle” which illustrates that soldiers are treated more like animals with no feelings and also shows how they are killed indiscriminately in war. Finally the line ironically contains an iambic pentameter which is a natural rhythm for such dark, grim, dull subject. The two novels, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, and All Quiet on The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, both present a similar idea of how soldiers are killed out there in the front comprehensively and the dehumanization of war towards its soldiers. The first novel is set during the Civil War, and it focuses on the psychological aspects of one soldier named Henry Fleming and how his naive thoughts about war constantly change through the course of the novel. The second novel presents the life of a soldier named Paul Baumer and his

To understand what a soldier goes through, Jerrell’s poem must be explored. His poem’s time era is important, it taking place during World War Two, because it was the most prominent war America has faced. The title alone tells the reader that someone has died. Immediately in the first line, Jerrell reveals the speaker of the poem is retelling his death story. In the first line, Jerrell talks about him being in his mother’s belly and then falling into the state. By his mother, he means the B-17 bomber. He has physically fallen asleep and reawakened in the turret’s chair. He could also be talking about the stages of his life. When he sleeps, he reminisces

Since the emergence of written history, many fables regarding war have encompassed a significant portion of prosodic literature. Two of the foremost war poets of the 19th and 20th century—Emily Dickinson and Rupert Brooke—have both written about profound implications of war on society and also upon the human spirit albeit in two very different styles. The book, Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger, theorizes through Allie, that Emily Dickinson was indubitably the superior war poet. Furthermore, when we analyze their works as well, we realize the invariable fact that Dickinson’s work delves into war with a much more holistic approach as well. She not only honours the soldiers for their valiant efforts, but also deftly weaves notions of liberty and civilian duty in regards to war as well as compared to Rupert Brooke who carried a romanticized imagery of martyrs within his poetry. In summation, Emily Dickinson is a superior war poet for her incisive analysis of death, and human nature in correspondence to war as compared to the patriotic salvos of Rupert Brooke’s poetry.

Poets frequently utilize vivid images to further depict the overall meaning of their works. The imagery in “& the War Was in Its Infancy Then,” by Maurice Emerson Decaul, conveys mental images in the reader’s mind that shows the physical damage of war with the addition of the emotional effect it has on a person. The reader can conclude the speaker is a soldier because the poem is written from a soldier’s point of view, someone who had to have been a first hand witness. The poem is about a man who is emotionally damaged due to war and has had to learn to cope with his surroundings. By use of imagery the reader gets a deeper sense of how the man felt during the war. Through the use of imagery, tone, and deeper meaning, Decaul shows us the

When faced with the countless problems of war including death, disease, sorrow, and loss, soldiers develop and intense bond between one another as they seek support in one another. A brotherhood is formed among these soldiers who rely on one another for protection and companionship amid a time in their lives where they are faced with the constant threat of death and violence everyday of their lives. But what happens to them after the war? In After the War, poet brings awareness to how the war-torn soldier attempts to reestablish their self in a society they have been isolated from for so many years through use of free verse and repetitive phrases, which further reinforces the theme throughout the poem.