Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner Analysis

This disheartening conceit, that eternally battles time for relevance, illuminates lack of importance people place on living beings, and on life in general. Humankind has lost sight of the original divinity of existence a

Randall Jarrell, in his chilling anti-war poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” emphasizes the stark contrast between the warm comfort of the speaker’s previous life and his cold, painful sufferings as a gunner at the warfront, in order to condemn the government’s impassivity towards fallen soldiers, treated as replaceable parts in war’s perpetual assembly line.

In the first sentence of the poem, Jarrell displays the speaker’s transition into an emotionless soldier at the manipulative hand of the government. At the beginning

Forced to drown his own emotions in the freezing waters of his pointless existence, the soldier is ripped from the the calming "dream of life" and forced into the state's cold, metallic underbelly. He resurfaces from his sudden shove into adulthood at the warfront, only to be murdered by the spray of bullets and the "nightmare fighters." The entirety of his life was cut off - too early - before he received the chance to live. Broken, the soldier becomes another replaceable part in the destructive war machine. This description paints the scenes of the poem as they happen, the powerful connotations of the words battling against each other, and to the grievance of the reader, the negative feelings prevail. This battle illuminates the brutality and fear experienced by soldiers, in WWII, during their final moments on Earth - their fear, sadness, and horrified disgust all hidden between the lines of these two sentences. Foreshadowed by the soldier's machine like tone, the speaker alludes to the fact that he will fight for his life, and