Quotation Analysis Practice

Dear Soldiers in the Fight for Analytical Genius,

Today's mission asks that you practice, hone, refine, and perfect your quotation-analysis skills.

Each of you will be assigned to analyze one of the following quotations. The question you should use to guide your analysis is, "What does the quotation say about war?" Sound familiar? I hope so.

Post your analyses to the blog by 10 pm this evening.

The Veteran: Blake, Browning, Eliot, Dinesen, Forster, and Muldoon
Episode of War: Carroll, Coleridge, Shelley, Nabokov, Miller, and Kerouac
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: Dickens, Keats, Hawthorne, Hardy, Hughes, and Frost
Killed at Resaca: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Whitman, Twain, Albee, and Dreiser
Two Military Executions: James, Conrad, Baldwin, Anderson, Achebe, and Capote

Here are your quotations:

TV
--"Mr. Fleming, you never was frightened much in them battles, was you?"
The veteran looked down and grinned. Observing his manner, the entire group tittered. "Well, I guess I was," he answered finally. "Pretty well scared, sometimes. Why, in my first battle I thought the sky was falling down. I thought the world was coming to an end. You bet I was scared."

EoW

He saw a general on a black horse gazing over the lines of blue infantry at the green woods which veiled his problems. An aide galloped furiously, dragged his horse suddenly to a halt, saluted, and presented a paper. It was, for a wonder, precisely like an historical painting.

OOCB
Keen, poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every fiber of his body and limbs….They seemed like streams of pulsating fire heating him to an intolerable temperature. As to his head, he was conscious of nothing but a feeling of fullness--of congestion. These sensations were unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment.

KaR
We all soon came to like Brayle as much as we admired him, and it was with sincere concern that in the engagement at Stone's River--our first action after he joined us--we observed that he had one most objectionable and unsoldierly quality: he was vain of his courage. During all the vicissitudes and mutations of that hideous encounter, whether our troops were fighting in the open cotton fields, in the cedar thickets, or behind the railway embankment, he did not once take cover, except when sternly commanded to do so by the general, who usually had other things to think of than the lives of his staff officers--or those of his men, for that matter.

TME

To one imbued from infancy with the fascinating fallacy that all men are born equal, unquestioning submission to authority is not easily mastered, and the American volunteer in his "green and salad days" is among the worst known. That is how it happened that one of Buell's men, Private Bennett Story Greene, committed the indiscretion of striking his officer.