War in the Works of Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon,...

War in the Works of Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen War has the ability to destroy not only countries and society, but families and individuals as well. Adverse effects are often the outcome of a war. It is not looked at in a positive way and often causes conflict. Through the works of Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and the 1992 Welsh film Hedd Wyn the effects of war are made apparent. All of them express their representations of war differently; however, the works have many similarities as well. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf shows the effects of war in simple and complex ways. Mrs. Dalloway has traveled to London to buy flowers for her party. The Great War had just ended and not only†¦show more content†¦When Septimus volunteered for the war he had no idea what he was doing. He went to war in hopes of becoming a mature man. He fought diligently and slowly lost his ability to care. The war left him emotionless and hard; he did not care about what happened to himself or others. He did not return from war a man, but a lost confused soul. His compassion was lost and Septimus ultimately was destroyed by the war. Septimus was not killed by a battle fought during the war, yet he surely lost the battle that he continued to fight when he returned home. Septimus ended his own life, he gave in to the insanity war had caused him. Siegfried Sassoon, like Septimus, joined the war with completely different expectation than what was reality. Septimus fought proudly and marveled in his bravery and his ability to be a successful soldier; he also had the hopes of becoming a man. This however is also what destroyed him; he spent the rest of his life suffering from shell shock. Sassoon was quite the soldier as well and earned a military cross and the nickname MadJack. Although Sassoon was a victorious soldier the war soon began to loose its allure. He wrote a public statement about the war and sent it to his commanding officer. He stated, â€Å"I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have theShow MoreRelatedThe Great War And Modern Memory By Paul Fussell927 Words   |  4 PagesIn 1975 the Oxford University Press published the first edition of The Great War and Modern Memory written by Paul F ussell. As Fussell states in the opening line, â€Å"this book is about the British experience on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918.† In this paper I will argue, that despite the numerous literary awards this book has won, it contains historical inaccuracies and shortcomings in relation to the accurate information provided that takes away from the prestige of the book. Despite the numerousRead MorePost Traumatic Stress Disorder2790 Words   |  11 Pagesvariety of types of shell shock, or as we call it today Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. We have had a chance to read poems written by Siegfried Sassoon Wilfred Owen who both spent time at Craiglockhart, a well-known mental hospital in Scotland, for suffering from symptoms of shell shock. We also had a chance to see for what shell shock was like during World War I when we watched a small series about it and got to see that it consisted of odd ways of walking, stammering, mutism, blindness, and so