The struggle of people emotionally and physically is the downfall and corruption of society. S.E Hinton, author of The Outsiders tells a story about two kids named Johnny and Ponyboy who are in a gang called the Greasers. They live in a wrong doing world of gangs and fights. After Johnny protects Ponyboy by killing a rival gang member named Bob, the two boys run away. A young criminal named Dally helps them escape. After an incident with a burning church Johnny dies and Dally dies soon after because of the sorrow Johnny’s death caused him. In the novel The Outsiders, S.E Hinton demonstrates that violence can lead to nothing more than emotional hardships, crime, and death.…
Being stuck on an uncolonized island and having no idea if they would be saved, drove the boys insane. As much as they tried to be civilized and to have structure as a whole, it failed because of the feeling of having power and the evil found within them. William Golding catches the children’s worst times of corruption and makes them significant by using the literary devices zoomorphism, imagery, and conflict. Always having compassion in our hearts is just as true as always having evil in our hearts because it is human nature. No one is completely righteous; we all have our…
Larson uses imagery to contrast the “clangorous Chicago” to “Holmes’s claim of lordly heritage,” which illustrate an dark ominous events in Chicago. This contradicts to why someone so “charm and smooth manner” would live in a unpleasant city, where overpopulated people and distracting noises were strain daily. Though “so unusual” in a haunting environment, readers can make distinctive comparison between Holmes and the disappearance of people in Chicago. However people such as Emeline, ignored the minor and concentrate on Holmes’s “extraordinary” well being and nobility. Larson express Holmes from “an English heritage” to make readers visualize the generous side of Holmes, but also grasp the terrors he planned.…
“’Such young lads -‘ He says it again: ‘Such young, innocent lads-‘” This repetitive quote makes the reader question authority as to how they can willingly send men, who have barely even lived their lives, to wars to be killed. These young men are like “Lambs to the slaughter”. All Quiet on the Western Front has been constructed with deep and confronting, descriptive and emotive language to portray the negativity of…
In its efforts to deny the war’s existence, Devon changes from idyllic and relaxed in the Summer Session to rigid and uncompromising in the Winter Session. In the summer at Devon, the boys play games on the “healthy green turf brushed with dew” to the calming sounds of “cricket noises and the bird cries of…
Death is no longer a stranger to lives of these men because of their traumatic war experiences, both on the battlefield and on the way home. It shows the fragile state of human life and how easily it can be taken from us. The memories of their comrades’ deaths have been engraved in their mind to point that it becomes strange for them to think about returning to their home and moving on.…
stamps on frightened fellows who could barely stomach the real world. The projects gave a…
The novel depicts how the war brings out disrespect and selfishness in the soldiers. Just like their constant companions the lice and the rats, the soldiers in the trench adapt to the hell that they find themselves trapped in – doing whatever it takes to survive. They even fight each other over food ‘at each others throats like hungry, snarling animals’. As the novel and the war progresses so does the inhumane side of the soldiers who become increasing more detached from killing, unconcerned with the death of friends. The soldiers are conditioned, hardened up and desensitised with self preservation becoming a key motivator. This is shown as the soldiers plunder the city of Arras, the allies ' town and vandalize houses with no consideration of the local people who will come back to a raided and shelled town. As they ransack the town ‘chewing food while pillaging,’ stealing and destroying people’s possessions, self satisfaction is their only concern. The soldiers become feral and even rebel against and shoot at their own Military Police who are trying to restore order. By these merciless and selfish acts the dark side of the soldiers’ nature is revealed.…
Graham Greene showed the destruction of war clearly in the short story, “The Destructors.” While the bomb craters and destroyed buildings were made evident, the damage done to the psyches of the children were a little harder to see. Even though these children were too young to experience much of the war, and definitely never saw the front lines of combat, they still wore scars that maimed them forever. Childhood was a very formative time in their lives of a person. It shaped who they would become and what they did. This story was set in the years following the end of World War II, and the teenagers of England had grown up in a country that experienced heavy bombings from German aircraft. Children born around this time had never known the peace and security that a child deserves. The children in this story had their innocence stolen from them well before it should have been.…
We no longer believe that some subjects are more appropriate for literary treatment than others: nowadays, every human activity, no matter how banal or disgusting, offers itself as legitimate material for the imagination to work on and turn into art…. There seem to be some subjects, however, which have a built-in intransigence to literary treatment because their historical reality, overwhelmingly banal, perhaps, or overwhelmingly disgusting, surpasses anything that the creative imagination can make of them. Writers instinctively shun these topics, it seems to me, and rightly so. It takes considerable nerve, therefore, to do what Timothy Findley has done [in The Wars]—to write a novel squarely about the unspeakable reality of the 1914–18 war in order to make that reality even more unspeakably real. Having read it, we're meant to put his book down angered and disgusted once again by the sheer…
As men ordained on a mission, Glanton's Gang is paid to seek out the scalps of Apaches and return them to the Mexican town of Chihuahua City. The gang quickly moves beyond the killing of Indians to include Mexicans, Americans, and whoever else crosses their path. The men are killing on their own accord. The excessive killing at first seems to be driven by greed. The senselessness of the deaths leads to the conclusion these men kill for power. Blood-thirsty and without the bounds of written law, Glanton's Gang become warriors, just like the Apaches they set out to kill. As Judge Holden explains to the gang around the campfire, war has always existed and will always exist. Every thing that exists is contained in war. By the Judge's theory, the actions of the gang are inherent. War is a natural occurrence and the men are merely acting naturally. War is a game. Throughout the story, death is treated as a game. While members of the gang die, the group continues, barely taking notice another man has been lost. Yet, the only real control the characters have over their lives is death. On the harsh plains, the only thing certain is death. Other occurrences are merely incidental or random. In essence the group treats death like a game; with no value on the fallen, only placing importance on the living.…
By the time many of the children of the inner city have hit adolescence, they have witnessed and experienced many tragedies that even an adult would find disturbing. They have sold drugs, joined a gang, have seen their best friend shot, or even killed their neighbor. "By season's end, the police would record that one person every three days had been beaten, shot at, or stabbed at Horner. In just one week, they confiscated twenty-two guns and 330 grams of cocaine. Most of the violence here that summer was related to drugs." (32) There events seriously impact the childhoods of the youth, and rob these children of their innocence by showing them events that are not healthy for a child's growing mind to see. Pharaoh and Lafayette, like most all of the other children in the ghettos, are faced with a hard choice: stand up for yourself and succeed by refusing to accept the cities violence, or succumb to the pressure that pushes down on you from…
Brodie Strozykowski Thomas 12/15/1 English essay Effect on kids around the world during World War II The streets are bare and sorrows echo throughout the devastated town. People mourn the loss of their loved ones as they try to survive the rest of the tragic day. Bombs burst in the streets and what was once a beautiful home where many memories were created is now reduced to ruins. Women and children cry out for their missing men.…
This short excerpt from Robertson Davies ' novel Fifth Business highlights the feelings evoked by war and battle, and as well the outlook of life after war. In this piece, war is not portrayed as being heroic, nor as being beautiful. It is described as frantic and unorganized, with many people becoming disoriented in the midst of random gunfire and shells exploding sporadically. This piece deals with the main character, Ramsay 's, war experiences in Belgium, where his mission was to kill a group of German soldier 's who manned a machine gun sentry.…
On the other hand, there is the young boy. Growing up in post-WW2 Europe, all he has ever known is destruction. It is evident that the young boy admires soldiers very much, and has studied them very intensely: “ ‘Black and red is the engineers… Plain black is the military police…’ ”(97). He is excited by the sudden intrusion of soldiers into his underground world (94). This is typical of boys his age, and is a contrast from the more peaceful views of his elderly guardian. The young boy has spent his whole life in the catacombs of a war-torn city. When he is exposed to surroundings that are different from this, he becomes uneasy.…