Comparing Night 'And The Things They Carried'

Grief is a relatively common emotion, and it is often said that it comes in 5 stages: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. However, as with many things in life, it’s wise not to generalize and assume all forms of coping with grief come in this way. Often, in times of strife and consistent, repetitive causes of anguish, it can seem as one ceases to feel the despair we associate with death. A great example of a cause of this outward indifference to death is war and the atrocities intrinsic to it. War and its effects on how people experience grief is featured in the three books Night, by Elie Wiesel, Slaughterhouse 5, by Kurt Vonnegut, which are about World War II, and The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, which is about

However, instead of mourning their fallen brethren, or showing any real emotion except exhaustion, they just keep marching on. This shows how during times of extreme stress, exhaustion, and a forced focus on basic human survival, emotions like grief have no place in the minds of men. There’s no time to waste bereaving when that bereavement could get you killed. Elie Wiesel’s book can be classified as nothing if not non-fiction, and that’s what makes it powerful. The knowledge that these words and images are what happened to Elie, scene by scene, day by day. However, not all books depicting such indifference are totally

The constant repetition of this phrase demonstrates not only Billy Pilgrim’s indifference to the deaths of others, but it also trains the reader into thinking this way in the context of the novel. During the later half of the book, every time a character dies, the reader thinks to themselves that phrase. “So it goes.” It’s the equivalent of saying “Oh, well” or “That’s just life,” because that’s the point billy Pilgrim is experiencing. The idea of “So it goes” is a perfect representation of the views of the Tralfamadorians, which is where the main edge of Vonnegut’s use of fiction comes in. Not only was the story fictitious in that Billy pilgrim was not a real character, and that he could travel through time as if he was somehow “unstuck,” but there are also aliens know as Tralfamadorians, which is arguably the most science fiction thing you can put in your book. The Tralfamadorians provide the perspective of something important: and outside observer. Tralfamadorians, whom will from here on out be referred to as Tralfs, are special as they can see all of time at once. They view time as not a movement through space based on one’s own decisions one after another, but as a series of predetermined moments that occur in order, and cannot be altered. The Tralf point of view is that there is no