Dalton Trumbo, author of Johnny Got His Gun, is known for his unique style of writing. Many acclaimed authors of books such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice have a formal writing style , on the other hand, Trumbo’s is informal. It consists of short sentences and punctuation techniques. This writing style is what sets Trumbo apart from others because this writing style is difficult to execute and it is hard to apply to other works of literature. His book, Johnny Got His Gun has won the award for “National Award for Most Original Book”. This book is about a soldier named Joe who has become handicapped after a bomb blast and experiences flashbacks which reflect back onto his past and present time. The authors’ style of writing affects the way a reader interprets the story through the use of literary elements and literary devices. Fine Three elements that define an author’s style of writing include diction (the word choice), syntax (sentence analysis), and figurative language (language analysis). An example of diction arises from the main character, Joe, contemplating what they fight for in the war. The quote, “Pay no attention when they tap you on the shoulder and say come along we’ve got to fight for liberty or whatever their word is there’s always a word,”( Trumbo, 118) displays Joe’s frustration with the war. The word choices of “pay no attention”, “whatever”, and “always” can convey the annoyance that Joe is feeling in an open yet honest way. Based on his works, Trumbo
The Outsiders written by S.E. Hinton is sold worldwide. This book sold more than 14 million copies. This hit has shown heroism throughout the book and readers never knew what was going to happen next. I personally think that a hero is Brave, Sticks up for Friends and Strangers, and also is willing to sacrifice his or her life for others. In The Outsiders Johnny best fits my personal description of a hero.
In the fictional novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien vividly explains the fear and trauma the soldiers encountered during the Vietnam War. Many of these soldiers are very young and inexperienced. They begin to witness their acquaintances’ tragic demise, and kill other innocent lives on their own. Many people have a background knowledge on the basis of what soldiers face each day, but they don’t have a clear understanding of what goes through these individual’s minds when they’re at war. O’Brien gives descriptive details on the soldiers’ true character by appealing to emotions, using antithesis and imagery.
Upon returning home the soldiers meet a field of new troubles that come with acclimation to society after fighting. Many soldiers come home with skills that are not applicable to their lives and generally a much deeper understanding of what they believe the world consists of. This leads to much disillusion with the world they come back to. In both Ernest Hemingway and Tim O’Brien’s stories, soldiers meet with disillusionment and disconnect from society. The soldiers react in different ways to this feeling; the authors use diction, sentence structure, and figurative language to demonstrate their troubles with acclimation.
Copious bullets, like that of torrential downpour, reign over the battlefield; a setting in which man created through dispute, engulfs each and every individual caught within it. Some are immediately spun into a downward spiral, while with others, it hits them in the midst -- even if they have built an immunity to war’s ways. Two fictional characters, both sharing a similar atmosphere, experience the true affects to war in their own ways. Although war never changes, the individuals do, no matter the situation. This is exemplified through the fictional tales, told by Liam O’Flaherty’s “The Sniper,” as well as Tim O’Brien’s “Where Have You Gone Charming Billy,” and as the main characters are to each their own story, they bear contradistinction to one another in the aspect of war, personality, and the emotional reactions to war.
There is no doubt that war is evil in every way. It is full of hatred and conflict and nothing comes out of it. It brings death, destruction, and the worst out of people. In a pacifistic yet desperate tone, Dalton Trumbo promotes anti-war ideals by explaining the life of a young soldier after he got affected by war in his novel Johnny Got His Gun. While some individuals’ point of view match with Trumbo’s, others may disagree with his reasoning. The controversial issue of the acceptance of war is talked about everybody, even popular artists. Some singers express their opinions on war via their songs, like George H. Cohan in his song “Over There (Johnny, Get Your Gun)”, and the band Metallica with their song “One”. Each sends different messages depending on the setting, their music’s genre, and diction used in the making of the lyrics.
Through literature, Liam O’Flaherty, the author of the short story The Sniper, clearly illustrates how horrific and destructive war really is. He illustrates the appalling agony of the Irish civil war through a dramatic story of two brothers against each other in the war. Through the the author's writing, readers can conclude that the theme of The Sniper is that war destroys families. O’Flaherty sets emphasis on this theme by using many strong literary devices. The literary devices used that apply the most emphasis on the theme are situational irony, setting, and the author's use of direct characterization .
“My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.” Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, was filled with embellished stories and memories of war veterans. O’Brien’s reasoning for writing that particular book was because he believed that while a memory can die with a person, written words are forever set in stone. In his book, War was every one of the soldier’s enemy; It did not matter which side they fought on. War took men physically and mentally. O’Brien displayed how war stories were based on a certain soldier’s experiences, morals, and personality; Readers never truly knew fact from fiction. O’Brien’s intended audience were readers who were
The Viet Nam War has been the most reviled conflict in United States history for many reasons, but it has produced some great literature. For some reason the emotion and depredation of war kindle in some people the ability to express themselves in a way that they may not have been able to do otherwise. Movies of the time period are great, but they are not able to elicit, seeing the extremely limited time crunch, the same images and charge that a well-written book can. In writing of this war, Tim O'Brien put himself and his memories in the forefront of the experiences his characters go through, and his writing is better for it. He produced a great work of art not only because he experienced the war first hand, but because he is able to convey the lives around him in such vivid detail. He writes a group of fictional works that have a great deal of truth mixed in with them. This style of writing and certain aspects of the book are the topics of this reflective paper.
My argument is that Johnny is innocent. My argument are going to be strong. My argument is going to talk about how Johnny had to kill Bob to order to save pony boy.
“ How To Tell a True War Story” By O’Brien is a complex story that scrutinizes the complex correlation that exist between war experience and the way stories are being told. Through anecdotes, O’Brien substantiates that a writer contains the ability to form its readers beliefs and viewpoint. Finding a meaning for O’Brien’s story was practically easy because through his anecdotes I was able to openly examine what O’Brien was
As evidenced from the past tense verb in the title of the novel, Johnny Got His Gun takes as its focus the aftermath of war for a soldier, rather than the optimistic, patriotic prewar time frame upon which other novels—as well as the original song "Johnny Get Your Gun"—focus. Although the novel remains clear about the fact that Johnny received his injuries from an exploding shell, Johnny does not ever think back to combat warfare. The novel takes as its opponent not combat warfare but rather the mentality of warfare and organization of modern warfare by the moneyed classes. Joe's memories related to the war, such as the Lazarus story, or the story of the man with a flap over his stomach, do not directly deal with warfare. Instead, these various memories create a sense of the incomprehensible decay, injury, and pain that result from war. Joe remembers the stories with a wry tone that gives a sense of the absurdity of each of the situations—such as the rumor about the man who lost his face only to return home and die at his wife's hands. In this sense, the use of the war in the text remains true to its use in the title of the novel: the war exists as a precondition for senseless and grotesque injury and
Sometimes the smallest things can be the biggest surprises. Tim O’Brien is an award-winning fiction writer. He wrote a short story, Ambush, about a man, Tim, who has gone to war and ended up throwing a grenade and killing another soldier. He felt very guilty and ever since has always remembered it. “The soldiers also carry stories: stories that connect “the past to the future”...” (Calloway). These stories are never forgotten and will forever be known and thought about. Many events that happen in this story come out surprising to the readers. In Ambush, by Tim O’Brien, there are 3 important messages or big surprises.
The story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien is an enormously detailed fictional account of a wartime scenario in which jimmy Cross (the story’s main character) grows as a person, and the emotional and physical baggage of wartime are brought to light. The most obvious and prominent feature of O’Brien’s writing is a repetition of detail. O’brien also passively analyzes the effects of wartime on the underdeveloped psyche by giving the reader close up insight into common tribulations of war, but not in a necessarily expositorial sense.. He takes us into the minds of mere kids as they cope with the unbelievable and under-talked-about effects or rationalizing
As long as there has been war, those involved have managed to get their story out. This can be a method of coping with choices made or a way to deal with atrocities that have been witnessed. It can also be a means of telling the story of war for those that may have a keen interest in it. Regardless of the reason, a few themes have been a reoccurrence throughout. In ‘A Long Way Gone,’ ‘Slaughterhouse-Five,’ and ‘Novel without a Name,’ three narrators take the readers through their memories of war and destruction ending in survival and revelation. The common revelation of these stories is one of regret. Each of these books begins with the main character as an innocent, patriotic soldier or civilian and ends in either the loss of innocence and regret of choices only to be compensated with as a dire warning to those that may read it. These books are in fact antiwar stories meant not to detest patriotism or pride for one’s country or way of life, but to detest the conditions that lead to one being so simpleminded to kill another for it. The firebombing of Dresden, the mass execution of innocent civilians in Sierra Leone and a generation of people lost to the gruesome and outlandish way of life of communism and Marxism should be enough to convince anyone. These stories serve as another perspective for the not-so-easily convinced.
“The Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemingway is a short story that tells the story of a soldier who returns home but realizes that war has changed his life. Hemingway ensures that the readers fully understand the purpose of the short story by using a detached tone, brief sentence structure, and a lack of imagery help develop the short story. The use of these literary techniques in Hemingway’s story allows him to develop his plot without losing his audience’s attention and include a message in the story. The story is told in third-person which allows for the reader to have a clear image of the soldier Krebs and his return home.