The minefield free essay sample

It is truly amazing to me how past experiences mold and shape us into the personalities we become. Great or terrible- everybody’s experiences are interpreted differently and then executed through their actions differently. All of our actions are the consequences of our decisions. Whether those decisions are consciously made, or not, they happen, and so does the ripple effect of events. Although I believe that this is very relative to us as individuals, I don’t believe, however that people in general are aware of how impactful they are with their actions. We almost never acknowledge that the simplest of choices have the capability of altering the paths our lives take. Diane Thiel, author of the poem â€Å"The Minefield†, exhibits a seemingly insignificant decision’s ability to change a life; using split chronology, cloudy imagery, and by drawing parallels in the images of the past and present. Thiel creates a poem that informs readers of an often disregarded principle and theme: life is short, and even the most ephemeral of moments have the power to alter the lives of people forever. The first stanza has a dream-like quality, like the images, Thiel tells us and helps capture the reader’s attention and instantly we paint the picture of two carefree teens running happily through a field. At the poem’s start an unnamed boy is â€Å"running with his friend†¦. somewhere between Prague and Dresden. † The fact that their location remains unknown already leaves us with an ambiguous surrounding image of the running boys. We then sense that one boy is more important than the other because â€Å"his friend is faster† and knows â€Å"a shortcut through the fields. † The two adolescents are starving because they haven’t eaten all day. Though this fact would not make me think something is odd, like two playful teen boys being too preoccupied with their own clowning around to realize their hunger, I already felt that there I was something wrong because of the vagueness of the images. The imagery puts an ominous foreshadowing on what is yet to come. The faster of the two boys â€Å"ran a few lengths ahead† like a â€Å"wild rabbit. † We can see that they are sophomoric careless teens. But, as I read more, the faster boy turns his head to locate his friend, and before he has time to think â€Å"his body was scattered across the field. † Suddenly, the almost dream-like state Thiel manages to corner me into, I am quickly shook back to reality, the boy stepped on a mine and exploded as his friend watched on from â€Å"only seconds behind. † While our attention to the poem almost climaxes, Thiel abruptly and intentionally throws in a short two-lined stanza. The briefness of this stanza reveals the personality and narration of the poem finally by Thiel saying, â€Å"My father told us this, one night, / and then continued eating dinner. † The narrator from the first stanza makes herself known as the daughter of the surviving boy. The divide in the timeline snaps the reader back into focus, and drives the rest of the poem. Thiel’s purpose for writing this stanza is obvious as she throws us, the readers, off balance. She shows and enables us to feel the discomfort at the dinner table. She takes an image that is so familiar to people, and makes it dark and frightening. By jumping so rapidly to an unfulfilled future, Thiel is able to demonstrate through the father’s abruptness, that the moment in the minefield never faded. Instead the image has followed him, tearing at him from the inside, and like a hot spring, all of a sudden her father can no longer hold the story and it’s dreary images inside. The first and second stanzas give us the image of the minefields as a destructive appearance, and also show how the minefields have followed the young surviving boy into adulthood. We see this clearly as Thiel portrays how these images in most cases pursuing him from â€Å"only seconds behind. † The minefields are the characterization of the effects of life’s decisions, and Thiel continues on with how those decisions, and those very moments, have the power to affect not one life, but many. Thiel shows the relentlessness of the minefields by drawing us a picture of the parallels between the young boy’s experiences and the narrator’s own. The young boy is burdened with â€Å"carrying† the fields from the very moment they leave him changed, until the furthest point in the time yet to come, at the dinner table. He passes them to his children in â€Å"the volume of his anger† and â€Å"throws anything against a wall. † Throwing objects at a wall such as a radio and a melon portrays her father’s uncontrollable violence directed towards everything (including inanimate objects). It’s interesting that the author describes â€Å"a melon, once, opened like a head. † This detail is a play on words and holds an image of what her father might have witnessed when his friend stepped on the mine. He forces the fields on his children â€Å"in the bruises† they â€Å"covered up with sleeves† until it was their burden to bear too. So that â€Å"years later and continents away† the â€Å"minefields† images stuck with him his whole life and passed them along to his children. They believed that like their father, â€Å"anything might explode at any time,† and they would be forced to â€Å"run on alone† with a threat of the explosion â€Å"only seconds behind. † The theme here is that decisions and our actions we make are rarely recognizable looking back. We forget, we move on, and we disregard hurried and momentary decisions. Rarely thinking of their value, and accepting the potential that choices possess to cause change and a ripple effect. However, as point out by Diane Thiel, moments and actions do change lives, and when they do it their short-lived that is remembered, it’s the split second of change that will be looked back on forever. As Thiel showed us with the young boy in the fields, moments whether good or bad, have the merciless ability to change a life, and the way in which that life or individual experiences the rest of the world and then harvests that energy.