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Compare And Contrast Wilfred Owen And The Story Of An Hour

Decent Essays

Explore the Use of Contrast in Wilfred Owen’s ‘Disabled’ and Kate Chopin’s ‘The Story of an Hour.’

Both Wilfred Owen in his poem ‘Disabled’ and Kate Chopin in her short story ‘The Story of an Hour’ use contrast to explore the key themes and characters. Owen accentuates the contrast that exists between the women before and after the war. He uses contrast to show the reader how he had a girlfriend before the war and that she had helped to be part of the reason him to join up, but after the war, he is abandoned and his freedom has been stripped from him. By contrast, Chopin emphasises contrast partially using marriage in how her life was controlled by her husband before but now she is free as she has been widowed. The use of direct comparison in sentences shows the main character conflict of emotions being experienced with the concepts of freedom as opposed to love being argued as the strongest emotion.
Owen uses the contrast of the soldiers’ state pre-war and post-war to highlight just how much the soldier has lost through going to war. Physically, pre-war, the soldier is described as ‘younger than his youth,’ and has an ‘artist silly for his face.’ Suggesting that his beauty is worth capturing permanently in paint. The words ‘younger ‘and ‘youth’ emphasise this man’s innocence and boyishness, the tautology places emphasis on how young he is thus outlining his immaturity before the war and making his loss at war even more tragic. The contrast once he has returned where Owen

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