THURSDAY, MARCH 20, 2008
Week X
African-American WWI SoldiersAnalyze Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum est" from a formalist perspective and discuss how he uses imagery, syntax, diction, and various points-of-view to create a call-to-action for readers. How are the soldiers described and how are we supposed to feel in relation to them? How does he bring the message home in the final stanza when he addresses us as his "friend"? Are we supposed to feel guilty, ashamed, or complicit in sending these men to war? Again, focus on how Owen accomplishes these goals through his use of language.
Although we didn't have enough time to thoroughly discuss Part I of Nella Larsen's Passing, select a passage or event from Part I that you feel is pertinent to one of the novel's main elements. Examples include the idea of double consciousness, the way Larsen uses the limited omniscient narrator to examine Irene's reluctance to remember certain events, or how Irene and Clare function as opposing yet complementary doubles of each other.
In the final stanza of the poem, Owen describes the gargling of the poisoned soldier as “obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/ Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues”. The imagery of this quote is greatly descriptive. Not only does Owen speak of the soldier’s guttering, bloody cries as like a cancer, and like the cud, or vomit, issuing from the mouth of one with sores on their tongue, but more profoundly he speaks of the tongue as being innocent as well. This then portrays to us that Owen believes in the innocence of this soldier, and that he does not believe the soldier deserves this punishment. And then, because of this innocence, the grief Owen makes us feel for the soldier is elevated to an even higher level. Through this description, Owen forces the reader to feel a sickening sense of pity. Then Owen hits the message home when he tells the reader that we are ultimately guilty for the sufferings of these soldiers, because of our advocating the “old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est/ Pro patria mori”. The fact that we know these truths of war should no longer make us want to urge our children to fight for honor and glory for our country, because on the battlefield in which Owen describes, there is no honor or glory, just death and destruction. And so the sense of pity in which he incurs in us becomes a sense of guilt, because we were the people who disillusioned these soldiers into going to war, and now we must see them suffer and die.
