To The End Of The Land Analysis

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In the novel To the End of the Land (2007) by David Grossman, few questions of gender and its relation with peace and war, arise. The protagonist of the book, Ora, is an Israeli Jewish mother that deals with the nightmare of having a child in one of the combat units during the war. The entire book is seen trough Ora's lenses which is able to describe and transmit her despairs and anguish. Ora, that was waiting to undertake a so long-awaited trip to the norther part of the country, trough the dreamy Golan heights and the Sea of Galile (To the end of the land) with her son Ofer, will be left disappointed when her expectations suddenly vanish because of the initiation of a new war. Ofer has been been just released from his three years army service and has been called back as a reservist for another …show more content…

Ora is tired of taking sleeping pills and she decides that it is impossible for her to wait at home alone until her son comes back (or maybe not). Therefore, she makes a vow and in order to protect her son, she decides to undertake that trip originally planned with her son, with an old friend instead, Avram. She presumes that as long as she keeps thinking about Ofer and speaking about him, she will keep him alive. Ora, is constantly hunted by the two prevalent feelings common for a mother, also explained by Virginia Woolf in her book Three Guineas. As Woolf explains, women are mothers applied to war. Thus, the interior struggle of fighters' mothers is twofold. On the one hand there is the pride of a mother that has a child that goes to war but on the other hand, the hunting fear of loosing that child. After all, Ors could not be in complete disagreement with the system since she herself has been a soldier in the Israeli army, in the two years of service expected by the young women of