Analysis - Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy? - Weebly

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Short Story Analysis

Characters

Private First Class Paul Berlin- new guy in the platoon. Scared about being in the war.Toby "Buffalo"- large soldier in the same platoon as Paul Berlin

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Setting

Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy takes place in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. They move through villages and fields until they got to the ocean where they were safe. That afternoon Billy Boy walked in the middle of the road and was blown up by a land mine and had his foot blown. As the medic was looking he was freaking out and saying he was going to die because he only had one foot. He died that day because of a heart attack, not because of the missing foot.

Theme

As you read the story you will be able to easily say that the biggest theme is fear. Fear is the biggest theme because most of the things Paul Berlin thinks about is how we was scared but would not tell his parents, so they would not be worried. Paul also uses different things that takes his mind of the war, but he gets his mind so far off that he starts to fall asleep.

Plot

The first major thing that happens is where they walk up to a rice paddy, the Sergeant knelt down and motioned with his hand and all the other soldiers knelt down with him. As they were kneeling down Paul Berlin falls asleep, leaning on the butt of his gun, Toby (his name is not mentioned until later) came up and woke him up and said he needed to stay awake. They pass through the rice paddy and he thought about how he would tell his mom how it felt and smelled with all the mud, algae, decay, cattle manure, breeding mosquitos, chlorophyll, and leeches the size of mice. They came to a village smelled like that rice paddy, and as they were walking they heard a dog barking they knelt down and waited until the barking stopped. They stopped and knelt down again and as Paul was kneeling down, Toby came and gave Paul a piece of gum and introduced himself. Then they start talking about how Billy Boy died, and what happened afterwards.

Point of View

The point of view is 3rd person because there is a narrator, another way to see that it is in 3rd person is that it uses the words he, his, they, and him. Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates. Get Started

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