Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
Sajer, however, cannot reconcile these feelings of tenderness with the violence of his world: "I thought of Ernst, of all the tears of this war, and all the anguish…My happiness was mixed with too much suffering. I couldn't simply accept it and forget all the rest" (Sajer, p. 150). Instead of filling him with giddiness and hope like most teenagers in love, Sajer's short affair only serves to darken his worldview more, and his parting from Paula is as wrenching to him as any of the horrors of battle. Though he promises to return to her, the war "prevented [him] from keeping his word, and the peace made it lose all its value" (Sajer, p. 154).
The final and most irrevocable moment in Sajer's path from youthful innocence to bitter disillusionment and despair comes towards the end of his tenure in the German ranks, when he and a comrade are surrounded by Russians without any apparent means of escape. By now, Sajer is in a position of command, and finds himself unable to act. He is so completely devoid of hope that he loses even the basic instinct for self-preservation and begs his comrade to kill him. His comrade is in a similar state of despair and makes the same request of Sajer, trapping them in a "grotesque dilemma" (Sajer, p. 410). Neither ends up granting the wish of the other, and Sajer must remain alive to ponder the desperation of his situation and his utter inability to act as a leader: "I was no longer trying to see where our danger might be coming from,...
I found nothing but despair" (Sajer, p. 411). By this point in the narrative, Sajer barely qualifies as a human being, and has certainly lost any semblance of youth. His cavalier attitude towards ending his life and his lack of any sense of self besides failure show him to be only a shell of a man, and the reader wonders whether any redemption or return to human nature is possible.
The most poignant statement of the extent to which the war robbed from Sajer any sense of human conscience or identity comes in the epilogue. After a short stint in the French forces, he is able to reestablish a somewhat stifled relationship with his family and with society in general. While he is haunted by the faces of those who died, he commits himself to one final act of despair: "There is another man, whom I must forget. His name is Guy Sajer." This need to completely wipe away his own identity confirms the depravity to which Sajer has fallen.
However, there is one indication that all humanity was not lost in Sajer, and that is the memoir itself. It stands as a testament to Sajer's self-recognition, despite his promise to forget himself. It may even stand as evidence of a small bit of hope left in Sajer's spirit -- hope that future generations would learn from him the utter and dehumanizing destructiveness of war.
Works Cited
Sajer, Guy. The Forgotten Soldier. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 1967. Print.
Works Cited
Sajer, Guy. The Forgotten Soldier. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 1967. Print.
Force that Gives Meaning Today I received an e-mail message about a funeral for a soldier in Texas. The sender who forwarded it wrote that his "faith in America had been restored" when he read this account by the deceased's wife: When we turned off the highway, suddenly there were teenage boys along both sides of the street about every 20 feet or so, all holding large American flags on long
The stench of heat and death was almost unbearable: "We lay there in the mud and retched from the stench of dead animals and watched the rats crawl over us" (Farwell 279). Farwell thus shows profound empathy for ordinary soldiers, forced to fight in a land far away from home under brutal conditions, amongst people they barely understood. Yet despite his willingness to acknowledge the role of Africans fighting
Furthermore, the author has also eluded to the negative consequences in which there is a complete lack of ability to define what truth is. In this context, O'Brien ends his essay by stating that a true war story is actually "…about love and memory. it's about sorrow" (O'Brien, 278). The memory referred to in this quotation is decidedly skewed, since the author has already proven that war stories, which
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" to F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" writing styles; James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" compare to my own life. Modernism vs. postmodernism Over the course of the late 19th and early 20th century, American literature began to turn inward. Instead of looking to outer manifestations of the human character, American authors began to use interior monologues as a way of creating a narrative arc. Stories such as
A favorite target for conspiracists today as well as in the past, a group of European intellectuals created the Order of the Illuminati in May 1776, in Bavaria, Germany, under the leadership of Adam Weishaupt (Atkins, 2002). In this regard, Stewart (2002) reports that, "The 'great' conspiracy organized in the last half of the eighteenth century through the efforts of a number of secret societies that were striving for
Montessori is an educational approach that was created by the doctor and pedagogue, Maria Montessori. The basic pillars of a Montessori education revolve around the ideas of the necessity of independence, freedom within certain limits, and an overall respect for a child's organic development, in regards to all that is both psychological and physical, but also verbal, intellectual and even social. Some scholars argue that no two Montessori schools are