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Themes In Fallen Angels Themes

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Themes are fundamental and sometimes universal ideas that are explored in literary work. The loss of innocence is one of the different themes of Fallen Angels. The title of the novel immediately emphasizes the theme of innocence and youth. As Lieutenant Carroll explains in Chapter 4, all soldiers are “angel warriors,” because most of the soldiers are still young boys and still as innocent as angels. By naming the novel Fallen Angels, Walter Dean Myers suggests that the soldiers’ innocence and youth are some of the most important aspects and can be more important than their religion, ethnicity, class, or race. The novel is foremost a tale of a loss of innocence in a squad of soldiers in the Vietnam War. Richie enters Vietnam at seventeen years old, and the other members of the squad including Peewee are also teenagers. Peewee is incapable of growing a mustache. His three life goals are to drink wine from a corked bottle, smoke a cigar, and become in love with a foreign woman. Both Richie and Lobel are virgins, and they fantasize about their first sexual experiences. Even though the soldiers join the war as naive youths, the war rapidly changes them and they develop into young men. Surrounded by death, the boys are bound to foresee the fragility of their own lives and are stripped of the carelessness and brazenness of youth. The dreadful horrors around the boys bound them to consider a world that does not accommodate to their childish and simplistic view. They want to only see a separation between what is right and what is wrong, they instead find moral doubt. Where they had wanted to see order and meaning, they only found senselessness and disorder. Where they wanted to find heroism, they only found the selfish instinct of self-preservation. These realizations destroyed the innocence of the boys, maturing and thrusting them into their manhood. The second theme is the unromantic reality of war. Richie and most other soldiers enter the war with illusions about what the war will be like. Like most other civilians, he learned what war is from movies he watched and stories that he heard and they portray battles as heroic and glorious, the army being organized and efficient, and the warfare depending on skills and

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