Burns As A Patient At Craig Lockhart Hospital - 1558 Words

Burns, a patient at Craig Lockhart Hospital, refrains from receiving help or talking about his problems. His memories of the battlefield daunt him and contribute to reasons why he doesn’t want to talk about his problems. To Rivers, Burns is known as a ‘fossilised schoolboy’ due to the fact that all that is left of him is bone and a small amount of flesh. After a bomb threw him into the corpse of a gas-filled German, Burns hasn’t been able to eat resulting in his body feeding on his own fat, leaving him as skin and bone. He started participating in war at a young age. War has left him only a shell of the man he was before the war. The effect that war has on Burns is physical. On a miserable stormy night, Burns leaves the hospital and heads to the countryside where he comes across a tree with dead, decomposing animals hanging from its branches. At first it comes to a shock to Burns but he becomes comfortable with the situation and begins to act in an odd man ner. He gathers the dead animals from the tree and positions them in a circle on the ground, where he then strips bare and lays in the middle. After doing this, Burns feels soothed. To anyone this is seen as unusual, but to Burns it is normal to him. Maybe Burns felt that this was how the animals were supposed to die. Rather than them hanging from the tree branches, they’re supposed to lay on the ground where they can decompose and become part of the Earth, just like a soldier’s body would. He was trying to give theShow MoreRelatedCompare and Contrast the Ways in Which the Writers Present the Horrors of the War in Regeneration and Journeys End.2304 Words   |  10 Pagesneurologist, who was familiar with Dr. Riverss experiments on nerve Regeneration in the early twentieth century, yet she chooses not to use technical jargon so that her readers do not divert the focus from the painful experiencing on the part of both patient and therapist. Journeys End was written by a playwright who had first hand experience in the war. His play is based upon real life experiences, mirroring the way he and his comrades lived and fought, it relives some of its incidents. Because