The soldiers, who fight in the battlefield, are pawns in the hands of those who glorify war for their own interests.Discuss this statement with reference to the poem 'John Brown'.
Answers
Answer:
here is your answer dude
Explanation:
In the song ‘John Brown’, Bob Dylan has expressed his thoughts about war, and its effects on the soldiers.Though he has defended himself by saying that he is not a pacifist and that he has never been one, the song John Brown clearly expresses his disapproval of the same.
The poem focuses on the young man ‘John Brown’ who proudly goes off to war to fulfill his mother’s wishes. John Brown fights the war and meanwhile his mother brags about him to the whole neighbourhood. She receives letters from her son in the beginning and after a while the letters stop. After a gap, she receives a letter asking her to meet her son who is coming home from the war.
The mood of the poem changes when the mother sees her son. She is unable to recognize him at first. His eyes are blown up and he has lost a hand. He is able to stand up because of a metal brace that he wears. He is not able to open his mouth and speak clearly. He breaks his mother’s illusion of war being something glorious when he tells her about her experience. Regardless of what Dylan has said about the poem, this part of the poem paints a rather gruesome picture of war and expresses disapproval of wars in general. John Brown tells his mother that she was acting proud while he was fighting the war because she wasn’t in his shoes.
He tells her that when he got there, he no longer knew what he was doing there. He didn’t understand what purpose he was serving by killing someone. Seeing the enemy at close proximity was the turning point for him. John Brown was shocked to discover that the enemy looked just like him and this shock led to a realization that he was just a pawn fighting a pointless war meant to satisfy somebody’s ego. He felt like a puppet in a play. By the time this realization struck him, a cannonball blew his eyes away. The poet shows us the reality of a battleground and the truth about the condition of the soldiers who do fight a war. The poet seems to be critical of those people who glorify war. Therefore, the poem is predominantly antiwar.
please mark my answer as brainlist
At the end of the poem, we see John Brown returning in a pathetic condition questioning the need for war. When he hands her the medals that he had earned, his mother is ironically shocked about it as she finds the consequences for earning those medals as hard to digest..................