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Notes on Birdsong

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Notes on Birdsong
CATEGORIES WITHIN NATURE | LIFE/DEATH | | BIRDS | | LIGHT/DARKNESS (TUNNELS) | | NATURE | | RELIGION | |

* pg.121
‘’ Jack Firebrace lay forty five feet underground with several hundred thousands tons of France above his face’’ – fragility of a human being. * Pg. 123
‘’THEY HAD DUG TO THE END OF THE WORLD’’ – THE SENSE OF WAR BEING APOCALYPTIC, THE END OF EVERYTHING BUT DOES NOT END NATURE * Pg.124
‘’There was an arm with a corporal’s stripe on it near his feet, but most of the men’s bodies had been blown into the moist earth’’- link to pg.135 * Pg.125
-‘‘immune to death’’ – the frequency of death and men’s being used to it.
-‘’ their company had grown important to him’’-comradeship * Pg.128
‘’At the front he hardly ever thought of home… he now inhabited another world’’- detachment/ dislocation from the Home Front * Pg. 131
-‘’any moment could bring death in a number of different ways’’- reality of war
-‘’The indifference he had cultivated, however, was to extermination of the enemy, his colleagues and his friends; he was not, he admitted to himself, indifferent to the prospects of his own death’’- * Pg. 132
‘’let them die, but please God let me leave’’ * Pg.133 description of a dugout-reality of war * Pg.135
‘’the war has provided all of us with daily lessons of anatomy’’ – pg. 124 link * Pg.139
-‘’walking in his sleep’’ –tired and exhausted; conditions of men.
-‘’narrow inferno of his existence’’- HELL, no hope, futile vs. ‘’There was blossom in the tree’’ – -combination of war and nature, force of nature over the mass destruction of land * Pg.140
-reality of war
-‘’consoling memories of a lost life’’
-‘’ stroke the dog’s head’’- metaphor for affection * Pg.141
-‘’None of these men would admit that what they saw and what they did were beyond the boundaries of human behaviour’’
-‘’ No one told; and Jack too joined the unspoken conspiracy’’ - do not want to be reminded of their

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