English 122 course overview and requirements

Thematic Use of Power and Responsibility in Three Short Stories

How can anyone possibly imagine how difficult waging war is without experiencing firsthand the horrors of being on the battlefield? The classics of Western literature have invariably been inspired by tales of soldiers sacrificing their lives valiantly, and today the harrowing stories told by soldiers returning from war are recreated, filmed and captured for posterity. One central concept, shared by all genuine representations of human combat, is that the reality of war inevitably involves balancing the struggle for power against the responsibility necessary to wield such authority. The act of reading a well-crafted war story can lead to a journey of self-reflection for soldiers and civilians alike. Penned during distinctly disparate eras in American military history, Carolyn Forche's simple yet searing poem The Colonel, George Orwell's mundane description of an execution in A Hanging, and Tim O'Brien's haunting elegy for a generation lost in the jungles of Vietnam The Things They Carried each present readers with a stark reminder that beneath the veneer of glorious battle lies only a desperate attempt by man to exert power over one another. All three authors imbue their work with a grim severity, presenting the reality of war as it truly exists. Men inflict grievous injuries on one another, breaking bodies and shattering lives, without ever truly knowing for what or whom they are fighting for. With their contributions to the genre of war literature, these authors sought to lift the veil of vanity which, for so many wartime writers, perverts a terrible reality with patriotic fervor. In doing so, this triumvirate of wartime writers manages to convey the true sacrifice of the conscripted soldier, the broken innocence which clouds a man's first kill, and the abandonment of one's identity which becomes necessary in order to kill again.

It is no coincidence that Orwell, Forche and O'Brien each include extremely graphic descriptions of the dead and dying throughout their work, because each author experienced these horrors firsthand while working near or within combat zones. Orwell served as a military policeman for the British army in the 1920s, during that nation's imperial occupation of Burma. Forche travelled to the war-torn South American nation of El Salvador between 1978 and 1980, interviewing the militaristic elite responsible for plunging the region into decades of civil war and internal strife. O'Brien was drafted to fight in the quagmire known as the Vietnam War, and like so many other young and vibrant American men of his generation, he was forced to sacrifice his youth on the altar of patriotism. Each of these three authors proves extremely capable of capturing the grim essence of war through the style of prose they choose to employ during certain intensely evocative passages. After setting the stage with a few seemingly innocent descriptions of her poem's titular colonel, Forche jars the reader with an unsettling description of his contempt for human life, remembering coldly how "the colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass" (563). This motif is echoed by O'Brien's almost clinical inventory of his first victim, in which he finds that "his fingernails were clean, the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him" (528). Throughout both accounts, the authors employ the subtle use of vivid corporeal imagery to transform a dead body, one casualty amongst millions, into an emblem for the senseless tragedy endured by both the vanquished and the victor.

A lesson that can only be truly learned by those who have fought for their friends and families on foreign shores holds that the fortunate survivor, he who escapes the fray physically unscathed, is seldom spared the mental anguish and spiritual guilt of his actions. In Orwell's account of a Burmese prisoner being hung -- account typified by his infamously subtle sense of humor infecting the ostensibly tragic scene with a touch of absurd comedy -- one especially moving passage concerns the author's sudden awareness of the murder which would soon be committed. When Orwell's narrator observes the condemned prisoner delicately step around a puddle along the path to the gallows, he observes how "it is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive" (596). In this description of the event, Orwell focuses on the apparently random distribution of power which led to British policemen holding a Burmese man captive, as well as the sense of responsibility shared by the executioners tasked with carrying out such a grim task. O'Brien expresses a similar sentiment in the immediate aftermath of his first combat kill, when he becomes intensely fixated on the Vietcong soldier he has just gunned down. Internalizing the death of a young man forced to fight a war against his will, a man in whom he sees much of himself, O'Brien remarks that "his life now was a constellation of possibilities," surmising that he may have "fell in love with a classmate, a girl of seventeen" before concluding that "after his years at the university, the man I killed returned with his new wife to the village of My Khe" (O'Brien 541). Following his first kill, O'Brien is reduced to brooding on the consequences of what he has done, and doubt begins to assail him from all sides as he contemplates the vagaries of fate and engages in the traditional eulogizing of one's enemy that nearly all men of war regretfully participate in.