Dual Perspective Opening
The entire story is an example of creating a dual perspective in the narrative. While the battlefield is seen through a child’s eyes, it is told through the ironic distancing of a third-person narrator, thus allowing the story to explore two different worlds colliding into one. The opening paragraph engages this dualistic nature of the story through a collision of imagery. The first half creates a tone appropriate for a happy little story about a young boy, much like the story is living out through his limited understanding. The paragraph ends with imagery that seems totally inappropriate to that happy little kids’ story which is much like the story being played out here that the child cannot understand due to his limited perception.
The Two Faces of War
The conceit of the dual narrative also extends to a dual portrait of war: one as noble fantasy and the other the ugly truth. The second paragraph is filled with imagery of the boy’s father coming to view the life of a soldier as a noble and glamorous call to duty directly as a result of being moved by literal images of warriors in books. The young boy’s toy sword carved from wood becomes the weapon of a mythic hero fighting for a superior cause of a civilized race. This fantasy view of war continues through the eyes of the child and is juxtaposed against the uncivilized and dehumanizing aspects of actual battle with images of men crawling along the battlefield like a horde of beetles, bleeding, drowning and gruesomely disfigured.
Dehumanization
The inhumanity of war is a theme that is underscored by numerous references to non-human creatures and this differentiation is often presented in somewhat bizarre and ironic imagery. For instance, after the second paragraph building up of the noble fantasy of the foot soldier as a mythic warrior hero, the child is snapped out of his fantasy world by the presence of a “formidable enemy” that snaps him back into the real world in which he is so overcome by fear that he runs screaming in terror through the brambles. What is this enemy that inspires such terror? A rabbit. After sleeping soundly through the night, the little boy again sees creatures and for a moment is paralyzed with fear that they may be a rabbit, but is soothed by the idea that they may only be dogs or pigs or maybe even a bear. Finally, he recognizes them as men crawling on hands and knees or dragging themselves on their bellies or standing briefly before falling to the ground or, most inhuman of all, behaving like the slaves owned by the boy’s father whom he used to leap upon and ride like horses. None of which are as terrifying to the boy as the rabbits with their long ears.
Incoherence
The story seems incoherent. The little reacts in a way that seems incoherent with what the narrator is describing. His emotional tone lacks the coherence one expects from a realistic story and becomes the stuff of nightmares. This emotional disconnect is the tonal equivalent of an ability to properly communicate or articulate one’s response to what’s taking place around them. This incoherence is transmitted to the actual ability to communicate first through the soldier who has lost his lower jaw to battle injury and so cannot speak to the child and then the later revelation that even had he been able to speak, he would still not have been able to communicate with the child who it turns out is a deaf mute. Imagery of frustration lack of articulation become the exclamation point on this theme with the soldier shaking his fist and the child capable only of uttering unholy sounds like “the language of devil” at the revelation that his mother has been become another gruesome victim of this noble game called war.
