Krigens håbløshed i Pat Barkers 'The Ghost Road'

The theme we have in this story is war, specifically how hopeless the war was, because everyone had a hope that the war would be short, but it ended up being a very long war and people lost their hope.People were traumatized and scarred for life. It was an experience nobody would want to go through, but our main character did, and he is traumatized for life. He is a person that just doesn’t care about death anymore, and just want to pull through and survive. But when he sees Hallet, who is what we could call a walking dead person, since his head is shut open, he decides to help him and he keeps making sure he is alive, even though he sometimes wished he would just die, but back to the point, our main character is a man that doesn’t care for anything but he softens up when he sees Hallet, which is a bit strange, because if he wanted to survive so badly he could have just left Hallet and run to a safe place. But no, he wants Hallet to survive, so even though he seems like a careless man, he might not actually be like that at all but because of the war, he had to be careless to survive. He seems like the kind of person that has lost someone very close to him, which could also explain why he wanted Hallet to survive. He might have lost a daughter, wife or friend that made him how he is in the story.He feels hopeless, and destroyed inside, but he keeps going and keeps helping, even though it seems like he doesn’t really want to, so he is desperate to survive but has a heart that desires to help people. As they find a place to hide, he talks about how the sun rose, which is usually a metaphor for a new start and something better, but in this story, it’s not seen as something new and better, he says it like it will just keep going like that and that the war will never stop. There is no hope, according to himself. It’s a never-ending, traumatizing war. And his view in the story makes the setting in the story very distressing, the story focuses very much on how hopeless our main character feels. Also, the fact that we hear it from his point of view makes the story so breathtaking almost, because we don’t just see the war from a 3rd person perspective, we see it through his eyes, and we read what goes through his mind always. And the story being in his perspective makes the story so much sadder, because we get to see how people in World War 1 felt like and what they were thinking which is heartbreaking and something we would never want to experience.