"Does it Matter?"- Siegfried Sassoon

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“Does it Matter?”- Siegfried Sassoon

Questions

  1. The terrible injuries are, ‘losing your legs’, which means that in war soldiers have had their legs blown away; ‘losing your sight’, which means soldiers have become blind as a result of war, and finally ‘those dreams from the pit’, which means that soldiers still have, and always possibly will have for the rest of their lives, the memories of war as hell, and also dreams about it. They will therefore remember the conditions they’ve been in when at war.

  1. Sassoon means, when he uses sarcasm to sharpen effects, such as ‘There’s such splendid work for the blind’, that war is really terrifying and after it can affect soldiers’ lives very seriously, such as making them blind, turning them disabled, and even killing them. He’s sending out a message that once blind, you can never get your original life back like it was before, when you could see the world. He is also stating that the blind cannot do things that people who aren’t blind can, such as work; Sassoon is feeling sorry for them, as he knows it wasn’t their fault for choosing to go to war, and that they were wrongly persuaded to go. Other sarcasm states that it does not matter to get injured in war; the repetition of ‘Does it matter?’ tells us exactly this.
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  1. I think the most striking verse is the third and final verse, as it contains the most sarcasm. The verse tells us that soldiers have a painful memory of war which lasts them a lifetime. It also mentions how people treat soldiers after war, after they’ve become disabled; there’s simply no respect for them. Sassoon demonstrates this to the reader in a sarcastic way, ‘And people won’t say that you’re mad;’ means basically that everyone thinks disabled soldiers are insane when they are happy after forgetting the past. ‘For they’ll know that you’ve fought for your country’, ...

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