Regarding the Pain of Others Literary Elements

Nonfiction, argumentative essay

United States, 2003; many references, however, are made to past events and foreign places, such as the Spanish Civil War and WWII.

This nonfiction essay is told from the first-person point of view of Susan Sontag, although the professional way she argues could be interpreted as third-person in many passages.

Serious, grave, explanatory

As this is a nonfiction essay, there is no real protagonist or antagonist. It could be argued, however, that the antagonist is the inundation of images in popular culture that devalues the image and obstructs the effects of argumentative images like war photographs.

Sontag sees a problem with the use of war photography, and she wants to clarify the issue by demonstrating its historical use, technical efficacy, and modern status. The tendency of modern culture to dump loads of images on people all day every day, moreover, diminishes the effectiveness of using images in such a way, and Sontag must make this tragedy abundantly clear.

In the final section of the book, Sontag again makes her thesis clear, this time by relating it to several fictional and real-life examples: war photography will never achieve its ultimate goal of placing the viewer at the scene of the event, simply because the viewer has never experienced war and is incapable of imagining what it is truly like.

In her descriptions of various war photographs and the techniques involved in crafting them, Sontag includes discussion of literal "foreshadowing:" shadows in the foreground.

In terms of figurative foreshadowing, Sontag's disagreement with Woolf's acceptance of war photography as an effective tool for pacifism foreshadows the rest of the book, in which she provides arguments to support her position.

"Images of dead civilians and smashed houses may serve to quicken hatred of the foe" (10)

Sontag crams this book full of allusions to authors, painters, photographers, directors, philosophers, and many other types of artistic experts. She also alludes to historical events such as the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, among many others, serving to tether her argument to history and lend it credibility.

As this is a nonfictional work concerned primarily with the efficacy of the use of war imagery as an argumentative tool, there is accordingly a significant amount of imagery regarding war. Throughout the book, Sontag quotes other books, references photographs, and paints verbal pictures, all of which deal with the atrocities and brutalities of war. A notable example is Robert Capa's picture Death of a Republic Soldier, which shows a soldier in the instant of death, being knocked backward by a killing bullet.

At their inception, war photographs were often used as arguments for pacifism; the photographers hoped to shock the public into anti-war action by showing them the horrors of the battlefield. Paradoxically, though, simply presenting an image is not making an argument, and the viewers were just as likely to be in favor of redoubling the war effort to end this slaughter once and for all as much as they were likely to be in favor of ceasing it altogether.

The use of movies to convey a sense of the horror and destruction of war parallels the earlier use of photographs to do the same; the effectiveness of each medium, however, dwindles as it becomes more prevalent, and eventually images will become so omnipresent that they will have little to no impact.

"'Morts de Verdun, levez-vous!' (Rise, dead of Verdun!), cries the deranged veteran who is the protagonist of the film" (16)

"And the vast mortuary plain disgorges its multitudes, an army of shambling ghosts in rotted uniforms with mutilated faces, who rise from their graves and set out in all directions, causing mass panic among the populace already mobilized for a new pan-European war." (22)