“He thought he’d better join – He wonders why.” (Line 24) Again Owen is creating an anti-climax but he is trying to stress the fact that the veteran feels as if he lost his limbs for nothing and he’s wasted his life for nothing, just a stupid mistake.
“For it was younger than his youth, last year.” (Line …show more content…
If we think about the character being described we can tell that he is not healthy as we link people having a good skin colour, to people being fit and healthy. Because of the fact that this man doesn’t have good colour and colour, in this case, is a metaphor for blood we know that he has lost his colour due to the fact that he lost a lot of blood and therefore has not just bled out his colour, but also has bled out his life This brings us to the third line in the quotation. It doesn’t mean that he has actually skipped half his life and is now old but it means that because of his injuries and his loss of colour, he now appears to other people as being an old man when he is really still quite young. This is also a metaphor for the fact that because he is now old, he is now actually very wise and he has learnt from the mistakes he made as a foolish teenager who signed up for the girls. (“That’s why; [...] to please his Meg;”) This is very similar to “Out, Out-” as Robert Frost also uses blood and life as metaphors for each …show more content…
This would have, or he thought it would have, impressed all the girls and he liked being the centre of attention. This contrasts beautifully to (“leap of purple spurted”) as he used to like getting injuries because of the attention it got him but now he gets a different kind of attention; one where people treat you like a disease which he now cannot escape from. There is another contrast here between playing in a football match and fighting in a war. Here, whether we want to accept it or not, both playing a match and fighting a war are games to particular people and he participated in both of these games and was one of the ‘chess pieces’ in both these games. Similar to “Out, Out -”, this creates a sense of attitude towards innocence to the reader and also makes the reader feel sorrow for the veteran. If Macbeth talks about Life being like a candle; so very fragile, then we should be so careful to cherish this candle while we can and to protect it by not making stupid mistakes due to immaturity. Both “Out, Out-” and “Disabled “convey a message of this and that we should live life to the fullest without making these mistakes. The character in “Disabled” now lives his life in regret and like the boy in “Out, Out-” cut short his childhood through ignorance but the veteran now faces a fate much worse than death as a consequence of