195-212

From here on out I am just going to assume the stories are true because if I don't then I just keep wanting to rant about the pointlessness of it all. Kiley says at one point, “This whole war. You Know what it is? Just one big banquet. Meat, man. You and me. Everybody. Meat for the bugs.” (212) I think the way this sentence is written shows more of O'Brien's [SYNTACTIC FLUENCY.] Kiley is going crazy and O'Brien has to show us this, not just tell us. He does this very effectively by making his speech very choppy and almost random. It shows the randomness of his thoughts and his paranoia. The sentences are all appropriately short and simple because Kiley isn't having any long, complex thoughts. The moral of this story, I think, is just to demonstrate how much pressure soldiers are put under. Even now with soldiers still over in Iraq we hear about soldiers going kind of crazy. It's a serious problem.

Pgs: 1-18 Part 2

So far it seems like O'Brien has taken a different approach to starting this story instead of introducing the characters by giving background information up front, he slowly reveals what kind of person they are by telling what they carry.

In another part of this chapter I noticed what I think is called a polysyndentone, however, this is not one of our literary terms I think that it's effectiveness helps to demonstrate O'Brien's [SYNTACTIC FLUENCY]. “But Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried 34 rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than Khe, and he went down under exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of ammunition, plus the flak jacket and the helmet and rations and water and toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest plus the unweighed fear.” (Pg. 6) O'Brien is describing that this guy is scared and because of this he carries a lot more supplies than most. He uses this polysyndentone to stretch out the syntax so that it coincides with the amount of weight that Lavender carried.