Sample Paper on the Death of Ball Turret Gunner | ENGL 310, Papers of English Language

Download Sample Paper on the Death of Ball Turret Gunner | ENGL 310 and more Papers English Language in PDF only on Docsity! Elisa Kay Sparks Engl 310.1 / Prof E.K. Sparks February 2, 2004 Born to Die: Sample Paper on “The Death of the Ball Turrett Gunner” Written in 1945, Randall Jarrell’s “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is a lament for all the small-boned young men killed in the ball turrets of the airplanes which fought WWII. Throughout the five lines of the poem, a central tension is developed between the competing forces of life and death. As the poem progress, over and over the young airman is born into a kind of death, until the last line, when he dies completely and yet paradoxically is able to speak to us. The first line of the poem introduces the birth-into-death theme by contrasting the safety of the womb to the helplessness of being drafted. The speaker declares, “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State.” He seems helpless, passive; all he does is fall from one place to another. The capitalization of the word “State” implies that he was drafted very young—almost straight out of the womb. This has the effect of telescoping his whole life; it is as if he had no childhood and went straight from birth into the arms of the State or the Army. The image of the young, defenseless being is dramatized even further in the next line, where the sweating airman is compared to a small animal still wet with amniotic fluid. “And I hunched in its belly til my wet fur froze” gives a strong sense of the airman’s vulnerability, sitting in the exposed plexi-glass turret on the bottom of the plane,