Enlightening War: The Ambivalence of Symbols in Four Tales of the Great War

Abstract

In this paper, we conduct a close reading of some fragments of Gaspard from René Benjamin, Le Feu from Henri Barbusse, Les Croix de bois from Roland Dorgelès and Clavel Soldat from Léon Werth to study the motif of light in their self-experience-based narration. We focus on light’s symbolism that these non-exclusively realistic texts use to both express critics on war’s traditional representation and give an own interpretation, sometimes ambiguous, of a whole new war experience.