Alexiyevich's Unwomanly Face: An Analysis

You meet up with a friend that has been at war for the last few years. Your friend approaches you and your group of friends and begins spewing gruesome details about it. The group immediately begin to make excuses to leave and you find yourself alone with your war friend. What do you do? Believing that war is separate from society is easier to accept than admitting it as a part of our individual lives. As a result we, as a society, come to reject the harsh details of war and further disillusion our own selves to believe that everything is fine by creating a false persona. With war comes a loss of identity, which further signifies disorder and a lack of control. The most important theme about war that we have studied is the loss of identity

Several women had to change themselves to survive during war and in Alexiyevich’s War’s Unwomanly Face we can see how women entered war in masculine ways that broke the social norms of what it meant to be a woman at the time. One of the interviewed women describes how, “Whenever I recall the past now I am seized with terror but at that time I could do anything, say, sleep next to a killed person, and I myself fired the rifle and saw blood; I remember only too well the especially strong smell of blood in the snow... It makes me feel unwell even to talk to you... It wasn’t that bad then and I could go through anything.” Some women were forced into war and had to adapt to their circumstances. Because of war, these women had to give up their social identities as women in order to become soldiers. However, after the war is over, they return home and cannot idly stand by as they did before because they now have the minds of soldiers from war. Their lives are forever changed and once your identity undergoes a change, it is difficult to revert back. The woman’s tone and diction reveal a clear distinction between her past self and present self. As she describes her past she is “seized with terror” even though it is her own past that she recalls. Furthermore, she

Due to war’s impact, people will forgo their own character for survival and because of this they will find themselves lost and without anything to look forward