Analysis Of Erich Maria Remarque, August Stramm, And Tim O Brien
Perception of the Enemy
The everlasting commotion of bombshells, gunshots, ear piercing screams, and the rumble of tanks began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. To say the least, hell broke loose in 1914, the mental and emotional scars that the soldiers of World War I bare is utterly incomprehensible to the common man. Through all the chaos, the soldiers never quite knew what they were doing, they were drafted, and from that point on for the next four years came the nonstop misery and false hope of the war ending. The soldiers of the war never had a hatred for the opposing side, it was forced murder; they saw each other with pity from time to time which the authors Erich Maria Remarque, August Stramm, and Tim O’ Brien exemplify …show more content…
This paints the horrible reality of war by restating the fact that their walking ground is a shit field. O’Brien uses personification to show that soldiers are nearly identical by having the same motives and witnessing the same gruesome images of bloody corpses and missing limbs or the heartache of losing a close friend. The idea of dead bodies everywhere and literal shit underneath their feet “seemed to erase identities, transforming the men into identical copies of a single soldier,” they are not only having to spare their emotional peace of mind by entering the threshold of war, but the conditions could not be any worse (O’Brien 1). They are so extremely mistreated that they basically turn off, they become robots following what their leader tells them and taking lives without a thought in mind that the enemy is human and has a family. The soldiers have to put a brave foot forward and block out gory of blood and the unbearable pain of gunshot noises that pierce through the sky. From time to time soldiers realize that “the war [is] full of freaks” who killed without out a reason because they were told to do so(O’Brien 9). There is no individuality anymore, just robotic actions of killing and returning to your bunk just to get up the next morning to continue killing, or potentially being killed; every single of them is being morphed into killing machine, each of them understands the pain of the
The everlasting commotion of bombshells, gunshots, ear piercing screams, and the rumble of tanks began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. To say the least, hell broke loose in 1914, the mental and emotional scars that the soldiers of World War I bare is utterly incomprehensible to the common man. Through all the chaos, the soldiers never quite knew what they were doing, they were drafted, and from that point on for the next four years came the nonstop misery and false hope of the war ending. The soldiers of the war never had a hatred for the opposing side, it was forced murder; they saw each other with pity from time to time which the authors Erich Maria Remarque, August Stramm, and Tim O’ Brien exemplify …show more content…
This paints the horrible reality of war by restating the fact that their walking ground is a shit field. O’Brien uses personification to show that soldiers are nearly identical by having the same motives and witnessing the same gruesome images of bloody corpses and missing limbs or the heartache of losing a close friend. The idea of dead bodies everywhere and literal shit underneath their feet “seemed to erase identities, transforming the men into identical copies of a single soldier,” they are not only having to spare their emotional peace of mind by entering the threshold of war, but the conditions could not be any worse (O’Brien 1). They are so extremely mistreated that they basically turn off, they become robots following what their leader tells them and taking lives without a thought in mind that the enemy is human and has a family. The soldiers have to put a brave foot forward and block out gory of blood and the unbearable pain of gunshot noises that pierce through the sky. From time to time soldiers realize that “the war [is] full of freaks” who killed without out a reason because they were told to do so(O’Brien 9). There is no individuality anymore, just robotic actions of killing and returning to your bunk just to get up the next morning to continue killing, or potentially being killed; every single of them is being morphed into killing machine, each of them understands the pain of the