Wartime Genre Study

Wartime Genre Study: Questioning morality and dehumanization in war.

-Thomas S

In the genre of war, we see some truly impactful themes and takeaways. War stories like “The Things They Carried”, “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “The Lottery”. In general, we learn a few things from these stories, the fundamentals of war being bad, and unless you are part of the war it's hard to comprehend how bad it really can be. "The Lottery" teaches us about the vulnerability of a person as well as questioning tradition and mob mentality. The things they carried had similar themes of mob mentality, the idea of even the strongest being vulnerable, and war does not care who is a friend or your feelings. And lastly, an occurrence at owl creek bridge wants to make us question our morality, and realize how meaningless war is and how it's just an awful thing, no matter how hard you try you can't escape reality. 

I hope a reader of all of these stories can clearly isolate certain ideas and see the constant ideas that question the reader's morality. Some questions the reader gets asked are “would you do the same in your scenario?” or “now that you know the character do you feel more sympathy?” One of the more impactful stories is “The things they carried” in which you get personal with these soldiers, simply following others in a mob-like manner. They run around and pillage areas because they can't cope with the damage that has been done to them. We learn about these people's loved ones and lives via short anecdotes. We feel familiar with them, and a few lines later they can just be dead on the floor. This type of reading also likes to provoke our morality. If the reader thinks about their scenario they are put in a dilemma. In the end, the author wants you to understand the atrocities of war, a soldier's friends dying all around him, the constant fear of a bullet taking him out, the lack of supplies, and the awful conditions they must endure and in the end a soldier is told to simply march forward, burn and bomb the enemy. They are trained to not see the enemy as human, no family, no friends, no love, no morals, a soul's life that does not care if its life is lost. 

Speaking of this idea of mob mentality and this “tradition of death” "The Lottery" is a great example. "The Lottery"’s a primary concern is to question the morality of the reader again, in the same way as the soldiers in the things they carried, we are introduced on a personal level, and when the main character is put up to die it is just accepted as if they don't have thought or emotion and because you are told to do so you must. In reality, when the reader gets more descriptors and learns more personal things about the character, it suddenly means something to them and they aren't just this existing unit now they are a person. The dehumanization of war forces soldiers and all participants to put aside any knowledge of the person and see them as not human, like the ants you step on or the fly you swat. You don't think about it, war would not work if you thought about the person dying as a loved one and someone with consciousness and capabilities of love and feeling. "The Lottery" exploits this feeling. All participants simply do as the other does, they draw the name, and like ants, they are killed, the only ones feeling something are the family of the killed because they understood.

Once again this is similar to our other story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” where we learn of a man who is typically seen as a disgusting and awful human (at least in today's society) where this man, a slave owner fighting for the confederacy, gets himself into trouble with the opposing Union. They end up putting him in a noose over a bridge however we forget about the backstory the man carries. Even though the memories and things we learned of him were negative, we saw him as someone to be saved, we wanted his imaginary scenario to be true. Even showing the mistakes and bad aspects allows us to see the humanity in others and see them not as their mistakes but as humans, not good ones but humans. At the end of these stories we witness the death of many, ones we learned about every aspect of their life, and some we only knew their name however these stories show us the human appeal to life. They push the idea of the morality of war and the price that gets paid to not only the person being killed but the family and friends. They are played like pawns on a battlefield, if you were to imagine the tens and hundreds of millions who have died in war you couldn't, you can’t fathom the idea of hundreds of millions with families and feelings and friends dying.