Bleeding Death: Mortality and Acceptance in Catch-22
$3.95
4 word format
document in english
literature
school essay
published 28/10/2007
review : not yet assessed
level : Advanced
requested 1 times
SummaryThe death toll during World War I surmounted fifteen million. The second World War erased the lives of fifty-five million, nearly five million of which were civilian Jews exterminated throughout Hitler’s tyranny. Nine million died during the Russian Revolution, and twenty million more died during the reign of Stalin. Almost sixty thousand American soldiers died during a small phase of the Vietnam conflict, a small phase that was eventually abandoned as a failure. Yet such numbers, relied on by every modern media source, are only mathematical representations. While striving to paint an honest portrait of war for those on the home front, for those distanced by land and generations, body counts succeed only at numbing the reality of death. They “reduce human suffering to cold statistics” (White). However, “human suffering” has been reduced to ideals far more pathetic than cold statistics for far longer than statistics have even been a common practice of describing war. Death means almost nothing in the modern era. It has been accepted to the point of expectation, and war has become only another means by which to fulfill the promise of finite life. Nations abuse death tolls for political defenses and political attacks, numbers that lie and erase the moral fiber of proper respect for those soldiers and civilians alike sacrificed in the name of the progress of freedom and democracy. Beyond numbers, death is such a common occurrence that soldiers, breathing it and tasting it day to night and year to year forget that it is not inevitable, a phenomenon explored by Joseph Heller in his book Catch-22. Death has become a tool, an object, not a means within itself, but a means to an end result molded in the hands of time and civilization. And war, its greatest ally, with its death tolls and body counts, its endless thirst for blood blurred in the minds of its very victims, the men and the women in uniform and the men and the women hoping and pray and trying to remember the men and the women in uniform in the midst of an easier path, the path to forgetting; war bleeds death in its most carnal form, that of innocent forfeiture.
Table of Contents
- The objectification of death in the form of statistics and body counts became prominent during the Vietnam, the first truly televised war.
- Reducing death to statistic appears immoral in and of itself, but the numbers themselves raise numerous other moral issues.
- Since Vietnam, statistics have become essential to explaining any violent act: they have become the obsession of the Western world, the only comparable measurement of death that makes sense of the endless bloodshed around the globe.
- ''I used to get a big kick out of saving people's lives. Now I wonder what the hell's the point, since they all have to die anyway??
- Heller's characterization of his soldiers, although written in a very satirical style, is honest.
- Yet in every war movie, every war novel, there is a hero. In Catch-22, there is Yossarian, a man so incredibly sane that he does not want to die, that he will do anything not to die.
- Former soldiers insult their former leaders, former Americans insult their former country.
Most downloaded documents over 30 days in literature Latest in the category literature From the same author
knowledge network