Presentation Of War In Short Fiction Assignment (Essay Sample)

Presentation of War in Short Fiction
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Presentation of war in short fiction
Being engaged in war is being engaged in armed conflict. From war, death is a too ordinary a product. It is the unsolicited reward to many that are fighting for their country. Mostly, these men term the battlefield as a glimpse into hell while others term it as a means to heaven. Most of these people worry about what will emanate from war and what will happen to their loved ones during the fighting period. Very few realize what happens to the soldiers when they come home. Ernest Hemingway's “Soldier's Home” and Tim O'Brien's “The Things They Carried” explore the thematic effects of war and the experiences of the soldiers in the battlefield. The young people that get sent to war do not come back home the same (Frey, 1986).
Ernest Hemingway's book, Soldier's Home is a unique opportunity to study the irony of a situation. Inasmuch as it is a story quickies edited by Albert Erskine and Pen Warren. Our concentration on the irony of situation that is in Soldier's Home is in such a way as to reveal how ripe the tale is for the studying of this interesting fictional method. At the very first part of the statement, “Krebs went to the war...” the war is immediately seen as a backdrop on which Krebs’s experience both past and present which shall be measured. This will be a peg of reality on which the irony of this situation hinges. Krebs serves as a representation of transformations that were brought about by World War 1. The values that were conventional before the war are different from those that came about after the war, such that the returnees of war were at conflict.
“The Things They Carried” describes a group of young soldiers in war and the tangible and intangible items that each chose to carry either physically or in their hearts. Creatively, the author manipulates two different ideas like loneliness and ambiguous morality in the exaggeration of the theme of physical and emotional burdens. These soldiers carried items that were vital in their survival during this trying time. These men tried to get comfort from the items and memories that they carried from home. With a list of items that each soldier took with them, the author pieces a puzzle together and we are able to understand the characters by the use of imagery (Bloom, 2005).
In The Things They Carried, Katherine Kinney maintains that Mary Anne serves as a vehicle for the illustration of how the war stories are constructed and how these stories make up the knowledge combatants learn from each other. “Sweetheart is insistent about Mary Ann's self-discovery and its effect on the masculine activity of telling war stories there than on the lives of the men she leaves behind” It is astutely observed by Kinney observes that Rat reveals contradictory structures of narratives of war asking women to heal as well as absolving the men of all experiences that they are not allowed to know. In both The Things They Carried and Soldier's Home, the consequences of war on the young soldiers are well demonstrated. Inasmuch as they went to historically different wars, with Krebs from World War 1 and Mary Anne from Vietnam, they both experience disillusionment (Hemingway, 1985).
These characters hold stories from two different wars and they feel that they would be heroes on getting back home but when they do, it seems like nobody cares about their experiences. Krebs feels the need to talk but there is nobody to talk to. His own family has no support for the yearning that he has for talking. His mother came home when he was already in bed and when she told him to narrate stories of war, her attention always wandered. His father was a non-committer.
From the two books, it is seen that war is very impersonal and very individualized. In The Things They Carried, each man had his own habits and did contribute something different but in total, he is just another being. When one gets losers focus owing to their day dreams, they put others at danger. In Soldier's Home, the young soldiers behaved differently after their return home. Krebs spent his days sleeping or walking around in his home town full of boredom. His appetite is everything but diminished and his speech to others is brief and dry. He does not bother anymore to chase the beautiful girls that are in his locale. This numbness that he portrays damages those around him more so his mother when he says he does not love her.
From the two depictions of war, there are emotional burdens that accompany each of these soldiers. In The Things They Carried, the burden of fear that Lieutenant Cross has becomes evident as the story progr...