ATAR Notes: Forum
VCE Stuff => VCE English Studies => VCE Subjects + Help => VCE English & EAL => Topic started by: maryy11 on May 27, 2012, 09:40:50 pm
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The prompt i chose to do is:
"It is the victims of conflict who show us what is really important."
I want to do an expository but im stuck on thinking of some ideas or sentence starters, if you have any ideas i'd greatly appreciate it :)!
The book were studying is "The Quiet American."
Thank you!
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http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/13881.html
[T]he main thrust of The Quiet American is that no matter how noble you think your motivations are, it's what you do and not what your intentions were that determines the morality of an action. Fowler is not Greene's mouthpiece, exactly, but it seems pretty clear that the conclusion he draws after the bombing is meant to be instructive. That conclusion is that nothing justifies committing an atrocity. Pyle can shrug that wars have casualties and that it's sweet and fitting to die for democracy, like Thomas Jefferson heralding the salutary effects of occasional bloodshed — treating people like abstractions. But to Fowler, when you see a real town square full of real pulped babies, that's the end of the story — it's evil, and no amount of blathering about the greater good can change that. Card spends a lot of effort in Ender's Game establishing that Ender's motives are pure, but to Fowler, that actually makes things worse. You might be able to reach someone who knows he's doing wrong by appealing to his conscience. But someone like Pyle, or Ender, who would never do anything he thought to be wrong, who is firmly convinced that committing these atrocities is virtuous… such a person, Fowler decides, can't be swayed. He can only be stopped.
This is the sort of thing you want to be using as your starting point and fleshing out with more examples (including real world ones).