Hello Friends,
Thank you.
This blog is my response to the task assigned to us by our teacher Dr. HeenaMa'am Zala in the thinking activity and a comparison and contrast of two novels, to find similarities and differences between two war novels.
So one novel is "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and the novel selected by me is "Birdsong".
"Overpowering and beautiful....
A great novel"
— The New Yorker
Birdsong is a 1993 war novel and family saga by the English author Sebastian Faulks. It is Faulks's fourth novel. The plot follows two main characters living at different times: the first is Stephen Wraysford, a British soldier on the front line in Amiens during the First World War, and the second is his granddaughter, Elizabeth Benson, whose 1970s plotline follows her attempts to recover an understanding of Stephen's experience of the war.
Faulks developed the novel to bring more public awareness to the experience of war remembered by WWI veterans. Most critics found this effort successful, commenting on how the novel, like many other WWI novels, thematically focuses on how the experience of trauma shapes individual psyches. Similarly, because of the parallel narratives WWI and 1970s Britain, the novel explores metahistorical questions about how to document and recover narratives about the past. Because of its genre, themes and writing style, the novel has been favourably compared to a number of other war novels, such as Ian McEwan's Atonement and those in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy.
Birdsong is part of a loose trilogy of novels by Sebastian Faulks, alongside The Girl at the Lion d'Or and Charlotte Gray; the three are linked through location, history and several minor characters. Birdsong is one of Faulks's best received works, earning both critical and popular praise, including being listed as the 13th favourite book in Britain in a 2003 BBC survey called the Big Read. It has also been adapted three times under the same title: for radio (1997), the stage (2010) and television (2012).
Birdsong has an episodic structure, and is split into seven sections which move between three different periods of time before, during and after the war in the Stephen Wraysford plot, and three different windows of time in the 1970s Benson plot.
In one expedition across No-Man's Land, Stephen is badly injured but survives. In middle part during the WWI. Birdsong
In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan is also injured through bullet and his one leg is broken at the end of the novel.
In Birdsong, there is love story between Stephen and Isabella, and In For Whom the Bell Tolls, there's love story between Jordan and Maria.
Weir, Stephen's closest friend, is eventually killed by a sniper's bullet while in a trench out on the front line. Birdsong
While in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Anselmo loses his life when hit by a shrapnel.
Birdsong novel is published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present.
Thank you.