War is Like Love Easy to Begin Hard to End and Impossible to Forget Luigi Pirandello
Uploaded by Rinrin on Dec 20, 2008
“War is like love, easy to begin, hard to end and impossible to forget”, a famous saying about war can express almost of the loss which wars cause for human being. From the very past of history to the present, even though many wars have proven to us the cruel, inhuman and violent they were, more and more wars still happen with more barbarous and fiendish. The higher in techniques we reach, the deeper we sink in wars. In the end, wars do not bring any efforts, benefits or rights and interest for people. To get matters worse, the truth is war only take countries lower, poorer and deeper in the circle of sin. “War” of author Luigi Pirandello is one of many works which is against wars, especially World War I. The story takes place on a train in Italy during World War I (1914 – 1918). Italy entered the war in 1915. Using indirect description by telling the whole story in the third-person perspective and defining clearly the emotions of characters, Luigi easily helped readers to understand the cruelty and fierceness of the war.
At the very beginning of the story, the background itself brings us the sad and gloomy atmosphere of the “night express” which “stopped at the small station of Fabriano and continue their journey by the small-fashioned local joining the main line with Sulmona”. Even when the dawn came, it only made the view more clearly for us to see how tragic the passengers became. By using such words like “mourning, moaning, weakly, death-white, shy, uneasy, hide her face”, the author completely directly defined how disastrous their situations even though we readers have not known yet. By accident, all of the passengers “in this stuffy and smoky second-class carriage” were the parents of soldiers who sent to the front in war. Their sons were died or wounded, which made the parents suffered the sadness, loneliness, bitterness and wretchedness inside each of them. Definitely because of suffering from that hurt, the man in the story muttered “Nasty world!” After all the description, we can assume that this partially reflect the feelings of each passengers, whose emotions were tried to be kept inside although they were so enormous to hide. The woman in the story felt so sorry, exhausted and tired to explain to another passenger her own situation. After her husband’s story, the passengers understood and tried...