In Jeanette Winterson's novel The Passion, the young soldier Henri is a passionate admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte and enlists to fight in his army. Looking back on the Napoleonic Wars years later, Henri says:
Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to keep...
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the pain at bay. Words about war that are easy on the eye.
Although words like rape and slaughter are some of the strongest available to the writer, they still do not come close to describing the horror of war. Despite all that has been written about military combat, none of it comes close to conveying the reality, a reality which not even the soldiers themselves can face in their struggle to survive.
In "How to Tell a True War Story," Tim O'Brien also reflects on the inadequacy of language to convey the reality of war. He says that a true war story is never moral. If a story depicts the soldiers as courageous and heroic, it is bound to be false. Later, when he and some of the other combatants try to work out the moral behind an experience they do not understand, O'Brien concludes:
In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh."
Both narrators complain about the inadequacy of language to convey what they have to say. They continue trying to communicate because something about the experience drives them to try to make others understand what they have seen and felt, and language is the only tool they have at their disposal.