Preview

Violence In 'The Corpse Washer'

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
360 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Violence In 'The Corpse Washer'
The Corpse Washer can be seen as a novel about Hussein’s dictatorship, about post Iraq war’s situation but likewise as a novel that tries to clarify and show the invasion of America into Iraq because they want to change the Iraqi way of life after arresting Saddam Hussein.
In either way the novel contains violence. In different shapes, ways, and appearances violence in Iraq is depicted. To describe the violence produced in Iraq it is obvious to do it with the help of language. Violent terms with negative connotations as “corpse” and “dictatorship” are used to clarify the violent undertone, which dominate the Iraqi way of life.
Jawad paraphrases and circumscribes but likewise directly describes the violence his family and, in general, the

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    In The Country Of Men

    • 806 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Hisham Matar’s 2009 novel, In The Country of Men, offers up the narrative of a child, Suleiman, a boy living under a dictatorship and a family that keeps secrets from him. Through Suleiman, Matar reveals an interpretation of life under a dictatorship through expressing a child’s experiences and views of betrayal and loyalty. Matar symbolizes this child as the nation under a dictatorship. In particular, Matar attempts to further express the transformation of people living under a dictatorship by symbolizing the child, Suleiman’s, through many encounters with betrayals and secrets from his family members, conversion from a naive, ignorant, and subdued boy to an exposed and even malicious and powerful “man”.…

    • 806 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The two poems ‘The Yellow Palm’ and ‘at the border, 1979’ both show and explore their ideas very similar to each other. ‘The Yellow Palm’ gives an eye witness account of what the poet Robert Minhinnick saw as he walked down ‘Palestine street’ which is the features street that is repeated at the beginning of each stanza. The poem shows the various things he saw as he walked down Palestine Street. ‘A coffin made of glass ’. Right in the first stanza it immediately shows the results of conflict as this obviously suggests that someone is dead. The line right after ‘a coffin made of glass’ says ‘and the face of the man who lay within who had breathed a poison gas.’ This line can show the cause of his death, but it also has a key linking to the chemical warfare which Saddam Hussein used upon his nation.…

    • 887 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Half of the prose demonstrate raw pain, and the other half are devoid of emotion. By living through those awesome moments the author lost something of himself in those ten years. With each passing horrible event he quiets, soon the reader too finds himself becoming numb. One must be very wary as his message becomes muddled! Thomas L. Friedman wrote this historical diary of his memories to preserve the importance of the real life rather than just the politics of it, yet his pain in his biography leave a profound effect that dulls the pain with each additional account of violence. This leaves the novel light, and superficial. Further, it leaves the readers with feeling they watched a 6 hour news broadcast, resulting in feeling that they can’t care anymore, like the Beirutis, the readers must protect themselves, drown out the pain, and move…

    • 987 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Generals Die in Bed

    • 1342 Words
    • 6 Pages

    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.…

    • 1342 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The language of war is different for everyone. It greatly affects how your audience perceives war and its meaning. Using particular words to derive the meaning from the truth, can usually manipulate the reader from seeing the actual truth. The author talks to the audience in a way that connects with them through the words and stories told in these essays. The use of diction has the power to persuade the audience to a specific side of believability.…

    • 794 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer David Zucchino's "Where Violence Dwells: The Place Factor In Philadelphia And Its Suburbs, The Homicide Rate Closely Parallels The Poverty Rate" argues that high rates of violence are not associated with race, but with the socio-economic conditions of a place.…

    • 641 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Rafi is able to effortlessly manipulate simple words into striking picture. On page one hundred and sixty eight, he says “Then I remember the face of an Iraqi woman running on a deserted street in Baghad during a bombing run. Her mouth wide open and her eyes are bulging with terror”, puts the reader in the situation through the descriptive words. On the very same page, another image appears, “Does she have the same nightmares as that little Vietnamese girl with napalm burns, running naked on a street in Saigon, crying for help?” Again, Rafi paints another powerful in our minds. Rafi also talks about his his nightmare on page one hundred and sixty seven. He says, “It is always pitch dark and I am running away from rioters. Somtimes I am on a runway, chasing a plane that is leaving us behind.” This quote from Rafi pulls us closer to get better understanding of his constant fear. All these images in his short story help emphasizes how these types of events haunt him every…

    • 460 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The definition of family often tends to mean different things among varied groups of people. Violence, like family, also varies in definition and carries different cultural values and significance. Regardless of one’s meaning of family or violence, these two things in many ways influence and impact people’s lives differently. Hector Tobar’s novel, The Tattooed Soldier shows the impact of violence on people who each see family from a different standpoint. Furthermore, in the film Sin Nombre directed by Cary Fukunaga we see a different type of family heavily integrated with violence. Both Sin Nombre and The Tattooed Soldier demonstrate that the loss of family becomes the roots of all violence. In both works the main characters, Antonio and El Casper, lose their families through violence, which creates…

    • 1027 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    A Long Way Gone

    • 502 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The second book explains the functions, symbolical meaning, and types of violence. Violence can have a symbolic or thematic function. It shows us that violence lurks in everyday tasks and that violence is always metaphorical. There are two types of violence: injury and narrative. Injury violence is when authors cause characters to harm others. Narrative violence is the general harm of characters. The characters do nothing to cause this violence. Injury violence occurs throughout the entirety of the novel. The rebel forces attacked Ishmael's town and killed most of the civilians. An example of narrative violence is when Ishmael's uncle died from a disease.…

    • 502 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    A Long Way Gone Essay

    • 1003 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Beah challenges all the readers in the American to question the glorification we put on war. We assume that the struggles we fight are ideological compared to the savage civil conflict in Sierra Leone. We assume that killing with laser-guided missiles is somehow more humane than slitting a man's throat. But in addition to its emphasis on the beauty of human resilience and hope, the central message is that, hatred and violence consume everything in a society, especially children. The review from the Washington Post says, “Everyone in the world should read this book. Not just because it contains an amazing story, or because it's our moral, bleeding-heart duty, or because it's clearly written. We should read it to learn about the world and about what it means to be human.” It shows how we are so unaware of what’s going around the world and Beah gives us an up close look in his written memoir. As well Times say, “A breathtaking and unselfpitying account of how a gentle spirit survives a childhood from which all innocence has suddenly been sucked out. It's a truly riveting memoir.” Times agree and states how people can change within a blink of an eye, in Beah’s childhood memoir shows how the book develops Ishmael character and view of the chaos that surround him to understand how he was sucked into being a…

    • 1003 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    When writing a true story of war, one will practically always find themselves faced with death. It is almost as if the two are one in the same; War and death that is. For this reason, the conflict of life vs. death is one of biggest…

    • 786 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The author holds that there is a “nihilistic edge to terrorism” as their goals are for brutal destruction in some hope of ludicrous utopian goals. She also compares the training videos of our U.S. military with that of one Islamic radical terrorist group. The U.S. military training videos teach our soldiers to distinguish combatants from noncombatants, called the principle of discrimination, and to disobey illegal orders under the laws of war which have evolved from the just war tradition and have become international conventions and arrangements. The terrorist training video however, depicts the decapitation of enemies who had already been disarmed which is forbidden…

    • 1855 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Ismael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, violence and child soldier’s struggles is a major and common point. These passages were heart wrenching and difficult to get through. Beah went through a lot of hard times but he survived and pulled through with incredible strength and courage, even when that was not an easy thing to even think about doing. I believe that even though violence is an awful thing that no child should have to endure, I learned a lot through Beah’s awful experiences including war’s injustices and the importance of hope and courage.…

    • 515 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    A Long Way Gone

    • 715 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Throughout media, war is portrayed as a number. Graphs, statistics, and kill counts are often directly related to war; but, war is much more than a number. War is and emotional event. Rarely, individuals see accurate representations of the emotional brutality of war. However, Ismael Beah`s experiences, explained in chapters 1-7 of his book, “A Long Way Gone”, display the emotional hardships that caused Ishmael to grow up quickly.…

    • 715 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sacred Violence

    • 916 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The theme of sacred violence, then, has two components - human's innate affinity for bloodshed and the futility of denying this affinity. We see examples of this human instinct once John Grady and Rawlins arrive at the La Purisima ranch. Just as a metal rod attracts lightning, the two Americans serve as scapegoats for a community to exorcise its repressed hostilities. Alejandra uses John Grady as a pawn in her own adolescent rebellion, Rocha allows the arrest of the two men as virtual whipping boys for his daughter, Alfonsa wars against John Grady to purge the rage of her own past. Innocent in their youth, both Rawlins and John Grady never question their assumption that members of two communities can merge harmoniously. But after being expelled from the ranch, thrown into prison and unjustly accused of a crime, witnesses to the execution of a friend, beaten into submission by convicts, and stripped of their dignity, the two Americans learn that their souls are not only defined by their search of serenity and fulfillment, but also their ability to survive in the face of primal aggression. Rawlins ultimately cannot handle this duality of human nature and returns…

    • 916 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays

Related Topics