When someone hears the word war, what do they think: fighting, winning, losing, possibly even death? War is brutal, authors show us that in their literary works in order for us to understand what happens. Writers protest war using imagery, irony, and structure.
Imagery is vital in showing civilians war. In “War Is Kind” by Stephen Crane, readers can see “[a] field where a thousand corpses lie”(11 Crane). This reveals the effects of war. In “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen a horrific event, ”If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood”(21 Owen), takes place. In Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers the disgust of war is displayed to the audience through the author’s words, “...the husks of dogs filled with explosives and old arty shells and the...guts”(Powers). Imagery converts the author’s words into pictures. Irony makes people think.
Irony makes people see a lie then realize the truth. In Document A, Crane says, “War is kind”(5 Crane), but then he contradicts himself and talks about things that are bad in war. In “Dulce et Decorum Est”(Owen) the title itself is ironic because it is not sweet or right to die for your country. In Document D, Powers …show more content…
In Document A the reader sees the shift, ”War is kind/...Point for them the virtue of slaughter”(16&20 Crane). First we see the good then we see the bad. In The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien: lists, repetition, and parallelism are prominent, “because it was SOP…[b]ecause the land was mined…[b]ecause you could die…[b]ecause the nights were cold...because the monsoons were wet”(O’Brien). This tells us how unaffected he was by war because he became stonecold. In Document D, Powers uses stream of consciousness, “[o]r should I have said I wanted to die, not in the sense of wanting to throw myself off of that train bridge over there…”(Powers). He shows how all his thoughts were jumbled up together after the effects of going to