Theme Of Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner By Randall Jarrell

“Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.” - Herbert Hoover. Both the “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell, and All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque are both focused around the effect war has on young men. These two texts represent the theme of the lack life experiences for the young men who join the army.
The “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” hints at how simple and short the life of soldiers are. There was nothing fancy about the Ball Turret Gunner’s death. Not only is this poem only five lines long, it is written somehow in a formal tone. Although the speaker often speaks metaphorically, he by no means sugar-coats his own death. He is simply washed out with a hose. The Ball

This poem also underlines a stillbirth or abortion. The poem starts out with “From my mother's sleep”. With this the speaker immediately ties in the theme of innocence. It goes on to say “I hunched in its belly”. Here the speaker is saying metaphorically he is in his mother's belly, literally the soldier is in the ball turret. Later that sentence the speaker said “till my wet fur froze”. This gives the reader an animal like vibe. Continuing to hint at the idea of a birth. In the fourth line he says “I woke to black flak”. Metaphorically he is born to darkness; literally he is shot at and eventually shot down. The last sentence states, “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” Displaying how insignificant his death was and confirming that the author underlined this poem with a stillbirth or abortion. Not everybody is blessed with living a long life. Whether it is a baby that died prematurely or a ball turret gunner, life is a blessing that not all are lucky enough to live out. The poem is only 5 lines which represents the lack of life young soldiers have. The poem starts with the Ball Turret Gunner being described as in “Mothers sleep” or in the womb. He then

First of all, none of the main characters survive. The first paragraph of the first chapter states as follows, “It is autumn. There are not many of the old hands left. I am the last of the seven fellows from our class” (253). The narrator, Paul, lives the longest until dying peacefully at the end of the last chapter. Not only does the war affect the lives of the young soldiers, it takes them. For the young soldier’s war is all they know and can't fathom life after it. Evidence of this presents itself in chapter five, where Paul, the narrator, goes on to say “ He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in war” (81-82). The younger men feel cut off from the rest of the world. This plays a large in why they only believe in the war and nothing else including life after the war. Since they are “not youth any longer” they decided to flee from all the responsibilities that are implied when becoming a man. When they turned eighteen they began to love life, but now the war has forever scarred them, a