The Ghost Road

Assignment 1

Summary
The war takes a huge toll on everyone. That is portrayed in The Ghost Road where you follow British army officers at the end of World War 1. We follow a battalion through the struggles of war and we see how it affects them.

We start off by jumping straight into the action in the trenches. In this certain excerpt, we learn how harsh the war can be. The narrator describes to the finest details how all the wounded soldiers are laying around. Lifeless and helpless. We experience how the narrator tries to save one of his comrades even though the fallen soldier has a gashing wound through the eye and all the way through his brain. The narrator manages to drag him all the way through fire and back to the trenches all while he wonders if it was more humane to kill the soldier instead of dragging him through hell, all again. All this happens through the night as we see the sun rise except that the narrator had expected that it would have gone down.

Analysis 

The narrator is a first-person narrator. It is most likely a high ranked soldier since he can command with the other soldiers as we see at line 19 'No more, everybody keep down' and they follow orders. The narrator seems courageous and brave but at the same time rather stupid since he defies his own orders and leaves the safety of the trenches. At the end where the narrator gets disappointed over the fact that a new day was starting, you get an insight to how stressful the environment was and how distressed the soldiers were after days with no sleep at all, which in our soldier's case are a whole of four days without sleep.  

The mood of the excerpt is very dark and depressed. It only revolves around death and how haunting it can be to experience when someone dies right beside you.

Pat Barker makes sure to describe every little detail for the reader to enjoy. He takes advantage of your senses and leaves nothing behind in his descriptions of the war, the frontline and the personnel themselves. He uses a lot of adjectives in every connection possible and his style of wording is a pleasure to read.

All the action takes place on the battlefield of World War 1. It's approaching night-time when we meet the first characters and it ends at early dawn the following day.