The Manhunt Flashcards
What year was The Manhunt published?
2008
Who wrote The Manhunt?
Simon Armitage
What is the plot of The Manhunt?
-Wife talks about her husbands trauma after war and attempting to come to terms with what happened
What are the themes of The Manhunt?
-Trauma/PTSD
-Discomfort
-Love
-Broken
-Fragility
-Loss
-War
What is the context of The Manhunt?
-Modern warfare- impact on wife (Laura) of a peace-keeper in Bosnia (Eddie Beddoes) in the 1990s
-Trauma of PTSD and physical injury
-Blazon poetry- describes lovers body
-Armitage, “She’s trying to defuse him”
What is the form and structure/ concepts of The Manhunt?
-made up of a series of couplets, mostly unrhymed (fragmented) creating a sense of fragmentation- matching the feelings of the soldier’s wife as she seeks to understand the man her husband has become
“the frozen river which ran through his face”
“frozen river”- relationship is cold, numb, cold, fragile/his mind frozen- blocking his wife (ice)
“through his face”- scar on his face/represents mental scarring
“the damaged porcelain collar bone”
“porcelain”- beautiful, precious/also fragile and easily-broken
-injury of husband, mental damage
“the parachute silk of his punctured lung”
“parachute silk”- fragile, delicate, broken
“punctured lung”- injured/broken, fractured, fragmented
“feel the hurt of his grazed heart”
“hurt” “heart”-half rhyme-fragmented like relationship
“every nerved in his body had tightened and closed, then and only then, did I come close.”
“closed”-past
“close”-present
suggests that they still aren’t quite connected
“the foetus of metal beneath his chest”
“foetus”-oxymoron-> growing problem/birth,life,growing
“metal”-oxymoron-> cold, unnatural
“chest” “rest”-> rhyme
What main theme does The Manhunt fall under?
War-> the problem of aestheticizing the horror of war
