Анализ произведения Ричарда Олдингтона "Смерть Героя"

Soon he realizes that his shattered nerves make it impossible for him to imagine his life with Elizabeth and Fanny after the War. Even if he comes back alive he would never be able to rebuild his life. All the decay and death of battlefields enter his blood and seem to poison him (metaphor).

There is something in the very look of his rifle and equipment, which fills him with depression. In his imagination he is already facing the agony of his own death.

The real problem of George is that he always takes everything far too tragically and responsible. This is the key to understanding of George’s suicide’s cause. Among the multitude of them this seems to the most trustworthy. He manages to avoid Death several times. In spite of his deadly weariness, he demonstrates great persistence and determination. He just feels sorry for his comrades’ deaths. So, this is the cause of his suicide. And the last drop for him is the moment when the wounded soldier asks George to kill him. He doesn’t care for himself at all, but he can’t bear seeing the aimlessness and senselessness of the War. He can’t bear seeing true, brave, self-denying men die for some doubtful cause and he stands up to his feet, opening himself to the machine-gun fire. Now he is whacked, whacked to the wide (anadiplosis).  

George is thoughtful.

Extraordinary generous, spontaneous, rather Quixotish (epithets) George is the only one person for the narrator in the whole of that hellish camp with whom he can exchange one word on any topic but booze, “tarts”, “square-pushing”, smut, the war, and camp gossip. As a rule, George is very silent, like most people who think at all, he has very little of the small change of conversation and dislikes aimless babbling. But when he is with somebody he talks. He is passionately interested in ideas, passionately interested in his own reactions to the appearances of things, comparatively little interested in the lives of other people except in general and abstract way. Consequently his talk is all ideas and impressions. He has an almost indecent love of ideas. If you threw George a new idea he catches it with a skilled and grateful snap, like a seal at the ZOO catching a fish jerked at it by the keeper (simile).

George hates the War.

He hates the War as much as he can. He doesn’t care about its motives now, but he likes the soldiers (antithesis). He thinks that most he can do in his situation is to die. He hates the idea of being born against one’s will, feeling that life may in its brief passing be so lovely and so divine, and yet having nothing but opposition and betrayal, and hatred and death forced upon one. He asks himself whether life is vain, beauty vain, love vain, hope vain, happiness vain (repetition).

The plantations of wooden crosses in the cemetery (metaphor) abashes him. He feels sorrow when occasionally he finds plenty of crosses with free spaces for the names of soldiers. He can’t accept this horror. While the men are alive, there are ready crosses for them.

George is intolerably tired.

He passes into the final period of war strain, when even an air-raid becomes a terror. His nerve is gone. Georges can’t help thinking about Death. How long it will be, - asks George himself, - before someone puts me there (on the stretcher-bearers)? He is at the very end of his endurance, uses up the last fraction of his energy and strength.

George is changed.

When coming to London for his fortnight’s leave, George can no more regard himself as the representative of his former society. Blast her (Elizabeth). Blast Upjohn. Blast the lot of them… Blast them (anaphora).

Speaking about the losses, they constantly use the phrase “three hundred thousand men”, as if the military men were cows or pence or radishes (simile).

In is not in vain that George burns his canvases. He becomes a normal man while his former acquaintances lack the truthfulness of life.

After the months of dreary training in the cold, dreary camp are dragged by (alliteration) George returns to the front line. Now when nothing holds him anymore, he feels deserted and feels not so much self-contempt as self-indifference.

In his bosom the author regrets George’s death greatly. The narrator visits his honorable (but still pitiful) funeral. We can say what we like against the army, but they treat men like gentlemen, when they are dead (black irony of situation).

The author says, that we must atone for the lost millions and millions of years of life, we must atone for those lakes and seas of blood (hyperbole/metaphor).

6. The idea of the text is to represent the aimlessness, the senselessness of the War. It is hard for the author to bear all the discontent towards the War alone and he expresses it to the readers.