Abstract This paper examines war imagery as it appears in three novels - Jeff Shaara's "The Rising Tide", Richard Galli's "Of Rice and Men", and James Bacque's "Our Fathers' War". It looks at how this imagery captures the absurdity of war and its many contradictions by having symbols and concepts uneasily juxtaposed against one another. More than that, the paper also notes how war inverts things, with the cross and the Church taking on chilling meanings while "dirt" becomes more meaningful than cleanliness. It concludes that symbols serve as powerful communicators of war's destructiveness and perversity.
From the Paper "In Jeff Shaara's 2006 novel, The Rising Tide, the use of symbolism raises some interesting images in the minds of the reader. For instance, at one point, as his tank crew is firing on a German tank, it occurs to a British officer of the British Seventh Armored Division that the first thing they always see through the dust and dirt of war are the crosses - the crosses marking German tanks on the battlefield of the Libyan Desert (Shaara, 9). The cross is supposed to represent Christianity, of course, but in the desert it is inverted in the mind to represent something else: killing machines that fire projectiles which tear apart Allied tanks and the men within them. Considering the absurdity of war, the symbolic potency of finding crosses in the middle of a war-torn desert is quite powerful."
