Silent Motif

Throughout the whole book I kept my eyes peeled for motifs that I could incorporate into my blog. (Yes, I just finished the last page of the book.) Other than the obvious common theme of death and life, I decided I would adopt the motif of silence, or noise to scour. All throughout the book it seemed to me that O'Brien would relate every experience he encountered to what he heard or better yet what he didn't. The most prime example would be the men in the jungle who believed they heard people partying at night. Another example would include Norman Bowker's suicide. His mother said he was a quiet boy and probably didn't want to bother anyone with his death. Many other war stories throughout the book were described by what they could hear - grenades exploding, men yelling, or perhaps even the silence after the battle when soldier's bodies were being carried away. As for the purpose of this motif, I think the men in the book like to describe things by the intangibles. They do this because more times than not, the tangibles, such as each other, photographs, and security blankets either prove to be unreliable or can be lost at any given moment. By describing things by noise, the audience is not only clued in on what these men paid attention to most, but also how the intangibles, such as ghostly noises or silence in the night, seem to always be present.