Thursday, October 22, 2015

Exploration 6 by Andy Pickard

          I think Field Trip had the most meaning to me so far. There seems to be no trace of the war on this small farm, regardless of all the torment that went on there. I think that this represented how most veterans felt after the war, they were expected to go home and try to just forget about the war regardless of what they had seen. For example on page 176, "Now looking out at the field, I wondered if it was all a mistake. Everything was too ordinary." He comes back expecting to remember his friend's face by seeing where he was when he died. But all he came back to was a small field with people farming. It is almost as if the land had forgotten about the war and death that occurred.
          The character I have connected with the most is Henry Dobbins. He is a very hopeful and kind person who wants to help people. Even after his girlfriend broke up with him he still wore the pantyhose around his neck, hoping that it's luck would never run out and that it would help him survive the war. Also, when he is talking to Kiowa he said he would want to be a minister just to help people. I have always extremely respected people who can continue on being a good person even after the horrors of a war.
          One convention of narrative that I have noticed is the use of long run-on sentences. These sentences usually express something in extreme detail. For example, the passage below is talking about a man who was killed and going in deep detail about the brutality. It really makes you imagine the horrors they faced.
          "His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his eyebrows were then and arched like a woman's, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull..." This really impacted me because it shows in detail the absolute horrors of war and how they are killing human beings not just the enemy. It shows that it must be impossible to feel nothing when killing someone regardless of what side they are fighting on.

1 comment:

  1. I had the quote in your last paragraph highlighted also, it gave me goosebumps. It's shocking to even read about something like that, I can't even fathom being apart of war and actually experiencing a scene like that first hand.

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