remains - simon armitage

theme: - Effects / Consequences of War (onto soldiers) - Guilt / Trauma (poppies or war photo)

Dramatic monologue

• Colloquial language (“On another occasion”, “legs it”) with lots of repetition allows the poem to feel like a stream of consciousness of the soldier, helping build an authentic view into the horrors of the murder

• The killing has become a normalized, everyday task. However, the irony is in the fact the soldier will forever be traumatized and guilt-ridden from the incident (“the drink and the drugs won’t flush him out”)

Change in pronouns (From “myself and somebody else and somebody else”, “all three”, “us” to “my”)

• Armitage syntactically uses pronouns to show the progression of the narrator’s guilt

• In the beginning, the collective pronouns establish the soldiers as a group, all of ‘the same mind’. The narrator could be alleviating his guilt, unable to properly take responsibility for the crime he solely has committed himself. 

• Towards the end, pronouns switch back to personal and possessive. This suggests that the soldier is fully accepting of the atrocity that he has committed (looter go die)

• context: soldiers were often seen as tough alphas, however, many suffered from PTSD. Through remains, Armitage explores the inner conflict and guilt of soldiers after their missions, which appears to be a retrospective recognition that this was a decision that has lasting mental repercussions for the soldier.

“probably armed, possibly not”

• Not sure- fragmented memory.

• The doubt and questionable morality of this can be seen in the repetition of “probably armed, possibly not” 

  • Perhaps this could be the soldier’s denial of such an incident, trying to deny the fact he killed an innocent citizen

“Well myself and somebody else and somebody else”

“three of a kind”

• Collective Language + Pronouns

  • Presents the looters as a homogeneous group, with no individual thought.

  • The soldiers are in a war zone and whether they agree or not they have no individual ability to make a choice

• Lexis of playing cards/poker in ‘Three of a kind’

  • Dehumanizes the soldiers to mere playing cards, perhaps a criticism of higher powers that use such soldiers as pawns/cards, ruining the lives of these soldiers via inhumane orders and mental anguish afterward. 

“sort of inside out”

• (embedded clause) the informal, colloquial language ‘sort of inside out’

  • The casual tone used by the soldier in describing the graphic scene of the looter's condition suggests a sense of detachment or desensitization towards the violence and brutality of war. 

  • This juxtaposition of a nonchalant tone with the stark and visceral image of the looter's state serves to shock the readers and highlight the psychological impact that war has on the soldier.

• The soldier's normalization of such brutality can be seen as a coping mechanism developed in the face of the harsh realities of war, emphasizing the dehumanizing effects of war.

• shocks the readers as they realize the harsh brutalities of war and the psychological effects it has on the soldier, exposing him to such brutality to the extent that it is normalized

“tosses his guts back into his body. / Then he’s carted off in the back of a lorry”

• vivid imagery + callous tone

  • ‘tosses’ dehumanizes the looter’s body, tossing it as if the victim’s body is rubbish.

  • the idea of ‘tosses his guts back into his body’ shows a lack of respect and disregard for the looter’s corpse. 

  • evident in the soldier’s description of ‘tosses’, which associates the ‘guts’ of the looter as almost trashed which is tossed away. this once again shocks the audience, with the juxtaposition of the gruesome visceral image of the looter's guts spilled out of his body, and the nonchalant, apathetic nature of the soldier in reaction to the looter's death.

“dug in behind enemy lines”

• ‘dug’

  • reflects the permanence of the dead looter in his brain

• Pejorative of ‘enemy’ suggests:

1. ‘Enemy’ evokes a sense of the memory being an invading, foreign presence that has breached the speaker's mental territory as ‘enemy’, which suggests an uncomfortable sense of being under siege by this trauma.

2. Just as soldiers who find themselves cut off and surrounded by the enemy struggle to maintain their position and escape, the speaker is similarly trapped or besieged by this visceral memory that they cannot seem to dislodge or push out of their minds. (INNER CONFLICT)

“his bloody life in my bloody hands”

• reference to Macbeth, referring to the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands which cannot be washed off

• Blood symbolizes guilt

  • blood can stain, suggesting that the guilt cannot be washed off or removed, stained within the soldier’s mind. 

  • possessive pronoun “my” shows how he doesn’t neglect his crime anymore, finally acknowledges his crime (owns it!!)