My Brother Sam Is Dead By John Collier

War is a series of sacrifices used to resolve an international dispute. Choosing a side will show your beliefs and principals. Injustice causes war and war induces violence and destruction of nations. Freedom costs many lives, so a better future is ensured for the next generations. Authors James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier accurately portray war as an expectation and reality through the novel My Brother Sam is Dead. The novel constantly portrays the unprofitable risks and outcomes of a war. Tim, the main character, decides that neutrality is the best side to take based on the irony of war; the unjust nature of war caused the death of Ned, Life, and Sam.

Ned shows Tim the harsh reality of war. Ned is beheaded as a slave because he is African- American and was owned by Samuel Smith. He warns the people in Redding that the British are coming. Tim had seen Ned’s head as it “had jumped off his body and popped into the air”(145). The lobsterbacks stressed that they had given people the freedoms they had asked for. However, the British still decorated the floors in the slave’s blood. This had been Tim’s only experience of war first hand. He had seen war tear the bond between Ned and Samuel

He is a Loyalist and as a Tim’s father he influenced his decision by making Tim believe that he was a Loyalist. He valued human life and believed God’s will was to embrace people. Life had acquired the knowledge of the reality of war. Life told Sam and Tim, “... I carried my best friend’s body back to his mother… Sam, it isn’t worth it” (21). When Life gets caught in the war, he is captured by a British ship. Tim had found out that before father died, “he’d been sent to a prison ship… it wasn’t a rebel prison ship, it was a British one” (164). Life was an innocent man who died on his own side’s prison ship, swaying Tim’s decision. He had died of disease that the prisoners had. He learned that loyalty is not