"When in Doubt - Kill" A Closer Inspection of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Tinder-Box"

Author's note: I wrote this for a laugh and deliberately inserted an error. My purpose with this piece was to exaggerate and use some rather heavy-handed sarcasm just to show that particular style to my students. In other words: Enjoy this and do not take it more seriously than you have to.

The underdog. Most readers in our culture love him, this lone wolf who fights the authorities and wins in spite of having all odds against him. At first glance, the protagonist in Hans Christian Andersen’s legendary fairy tale “The Tinder-Box” from 1835 is the typical underdog. This soldier manages to achieve all of his goals: Incredible wealth, a significantly higher social status and a beautiful wife. On the surface, this is a happy ending that lets all of us believe in (or at least hope for) an opportunity to improve our ordinary lives. However, a closer look indicates that “The Tinder-Box” may actually be a warning against the dangers of human greed and the effects that war might have on a soldier’s mind. This is what this essay will explore.

From the very first sentence, the perceptive reader may deduce that something is wrong: “A soldier came marching along the high road: ‘Left, right—left, right.’ He had his knapsack on his back, and a sword at his side; he had been to the wars, and was now returning home.” Not only does this break with the “home-away-home structure” so typical for fairy tales, it shows something rather unusual: If this soldier is returning from a finished war and on his own, why is he still armed? Should he not have handed his sword back at the end of hostilities? An obvious answer could be that military life disagreed with the unnamed soldier and he has now become a deserter or some other form of traitor. One might think that he left the army because he was a pacifist, but it is quickly revealed that he has no problem with violence. After returning from the hollow tree with mountains of gold, the soldier bluntly asks the old, somewhat handicapped witch why she wants the tinder-box, even though he promised to find it for her. When the witch does not produce an acceptable answer, the soldier promptly beheads her. That escalated quickly, as they say online. Feeling little remorse for just slaughtering an old lady, the soldier puts “all his money in her apron and slung it on his back like a bundle, put the tinderbox in his pocket, and walked off to the nearest town.” His expert use of a blade and lack of hesitation in looting a corpse hint at a dark and gruesome personality, one that would not even be welcome on the battlefields of the 19^th century. It is indeed possible that this is what made the soldier leave his unit, as his temper and general behaviour were unwanted elements in the armed forces. This clearly is neither a peace-loving man nor a hapless creature suffering from PTSD, but rather a cold-blooded killer.

Apart from a violent streak, the scene with the hollow tree also reveals the soldier’s ever-growing greed. No matter what he receives, he wants more. In the caverns with the dogs, copper coins are replaced with silver ones, which he in turn discards in favour of gold. The soldier clearly cannot handle the thought that something should not be his, hence the slaying of the old witch over something as apparently mundane as a tinder-box. When arriving in the town, the soldier believes that material wealth will solve all of his problems and starts spending money left and right: “Now he was rich, had fine clothes, and many friends, who all declared he was a fine fellow and a real gentleman, and all this gratified him exceedingly.” Coming from a poor background, our protagonist tries to avoid his inferiority complexes by dressing and acting like someone from the upper classes of society, but all of that is on a superficial level. Nothing inside of him changes, and although he generously gives money to the poor – possibly a sign of some degree of remorse – his greed does not go anywhere. The right clothes, rooms and friends are not enough for him, he wants more.

The next target of the soldier’s lust is the local princess. Upon learning that “No one but the king himself can pass in or out, for there has been a prophecy that she will marry a common soldier,” his greed commands him to have her in some way. Clearly not one that likes witnesses, the soldier orders one of his dogs to fetch the princess for him – not one, but three times, since nothing can satisfy his desire. When he sees the sleeping princess “The soldier could not help kissing her, true soldier as he was.” Since this “true soldier” has recently killed a harmless old woman for no particular reason, it is difficult to believe that he would stop at kissing the princess , and “kissing” her – combined with the later statement that he “might have her for a wife” may be Andersen’s euphemism for some other kind of sexual activity (probably with the dog in the same room looking on). Earlier in the tale, the soldier could not see the consequences of spending his money at an alarming rate, and here he is actually dependent on the dog cleaning up his mess when it puts an X on every door to confuse the princess’s worried family. Obviously, he is capable of planning no further ahead than to what he wants right now.

Nevertheless, the soldier is caught and – quite understandably – sentenced to death for his crimes. Since he apparently has lost what conscience he had, the soldier decides that this is the perfect time to overthrow the government. By calling in his supernatural dogs, the royal couple are quickly killed in a brutal manner along with all of the best educated men of the kingdom. Unsurprisingly, this scares the rest of the people, who immediately decide to save themselves by giving the psychotic and violent soldier the king’s crown along with the princess. You would think that the princess would be devastated by being forced to marry the killer of her parents, but according to the text, becoming queen is “very pleasing to her.” Either the princess is no less greedy than her new husband or she suffers from the so-called Stockholm Syndrome and has fallen in love with her kidnapper. Since this story is told almost exclusively from the soldier’s point of view, it is of course also possible that she lies and just tries to stay alive a little longer.

Previously in the story, our protagonist did hand out money to the poor, but as king he only thinks of himself. His first decision (again, a greedy one) is to have a seven-day-long wedding feast, which certainly costs a lot of money. In addition, we also see what could be a growing paranoia when he insists on having his dogs sit at the table for protection, where they “stared with all their eyes.” This is a chilling image, and naturally nobody in their right mind would dare question the rule of this increasingly deranged soldier.

Andersen’s message is cleverly disguised, but a closer look reveals it: Greed may actually allow you to have shallow friends and an apparently prestigious career, but “The Tinder-Box” reveals the terrible cost to everyone else. What appeared to be a somewhat well-working kingdom now has a new king whose past includes betrayal, murder, kidnapping and recklessly spending money on entertainment and fancy clothes. Living in a society like that can only be described as terrible, and this story reminds us to think about the consequences of our decisions and not let money and greed cloud our judgment. Sadly, this message is as relevant today as it was almost 200 years ago.

An Analysis of Wilfred Owen's "Exposure"

An Analysis of "Exposure" by Wilfred Owen

In Virginia Woolf’s classic novel To the Lighthouse (1927), the death of one of the characters during World War I is described in the following short, nasty and brutal manner: “A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.” Just like the explosion itself, this passage is over in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing but death and grief. Although it is tempting to focus on these brief and violent situations, war is, according to an old saying, long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror; how can literature describe boredom while still being compelling? This was what iconic Great War poet Wilfred Owen attempted to do in the poem “Exposure” from 1918 in which a frontline soldier, shivering in the cold, begins to ask questions and long for home. In this paper, this poem will be analyzed and interpreted, focusing on the message and atmosphere and how these are supported by rhyme, rhythm, and imagery.

The title “Exposure” obviously is a term that refers to being exposed to the elements and at the mercy of the weather – in this particular case the cold as an enemy. However, it could also hint that the soldiers are “naked” and vulnerable or that all of their thoughts are exposed over the course of the poem. The latter might be true as the reader follows the thoughts of the speaker, who in this case is in the first person plural, as it may be seen in “we keep awake because the night is silent”[1] and “we turn back to our dying.”[2] Using this simple trick, Owen turns the speaker into a common identity and a voice on behalf of all of the soldiers, and the message is anything but positive.

As noted above, the soldiers are “awake because the night is silent,” something that underlines how surreal everything is compared to everyday life – and perhaps even to the normal perception of war. Of the eight stanzas in the poem, numbers 1, 3, 4 and 8 all end with the same line “But nothing happens,” which emphasizes the point about boredom or at least a lack of action with “but” signifying that something should happen. The German enemy is almost invisible, and the rumbling of artillery is “Far off, like a dull rumour of another war.”[3] Clearly, no combat is about to take place; yet in spite of these “moments of sheer terror” being far away, the soldiers still face a terrifying foe: Nature. It is ironic that this great inspiration for generations of poets should ever be an enemy, but here it is actually personified. Lines such as “Merciless iced east winds,”[4] “mad gusts tugging on the wire”[5] and “Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces”[6] show nature as an unforgiving and unpredictable force chasing the soldiers, who are forced to hide in holes like animals. A particularly noteworthy line is when a personified dawn amasses “her melancholy army, attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey.”[7] Here, a new day only brings gloom in the form of clouds clad in the same grey colour as the unseen German army. It is quite understandable that the speaker chooses to ask the simple question “What are we doing here?”[8] In an attempt to find solace, the soldiers let their thoughts (or “ghosts,”[9] showing that they are nearer death than life) wander home. However, there they only find “Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are closed,” meaning that there is no sympathy or understanding to find at home. In addition, the soldiers are so far removed from normal life that their only option, even in dreams, is to return to the battlefield, because only in that way may “kind fires burn.”[10] Nevertheless, the speaker shows how the soldiers lose faith in the line “For love of God seems dying.”[11] Indeed, in the final stanza, “His frost”[12] (i.e., God’s) has claimed the lives of several soldiers. The laconic ending of the poem, “But nothing happens,” shows how these deaths provoke no reaction even as their ghastly, icy eyes stare into eternity in a nightmarish fashion. All of this combined creates an atmosphere marked by uncertainty and nervousness where nature is the true, malevolent enemy in war, death is ignored, home is no longer a welcoming place and nobody cares about soldiers suffering a slow and agonizing death in the mud.

In order to make the slow, silent events in “Exposure” more vivid when read aloud, Owen uses a few literary devices such as similes and alliteration. Similes are efficient as a way of controlling the images in the reader’s mind, and one obvious example here is “the mad gusts tugging at the wire, like twitching agonies of men.”[13] Here, the personified madness of nature is likened to dying men stuck in the barbed wire, which underlines the aforementioned feeling of slow, painful death throughout the poem. Another simile (or at least comparison) is used to show that a burst from a machinegun is “less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow,”[14] where the contrast of black snow augments the feeling that something is wrong. Speaking of the machinegun, Owen cleverly creates alliteration: “Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.”[15] When read aloud, the repeated use of s’es creates a sound reminiscent of bullets whistling past. This form of alliteration appears to be a typical trait for Owen since it can also be found in “Anthem for Doomed Youth” (“the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle”) and “The Last Laugh” (“The Bullets chirped – In vain! vain! vain!”). In every case, it transports the reader into the battlefield and its sounds.

Two additional aspects which add to the impression of something strange happening in “Exposure” are rhythm and rhyme. The poem has no consistent rhythm, which is consistent with its tense and insecure atmosphere; this is not Burton’s strictly and classically iambic “The Game,” in which the constant rhythm sounds like soldiers on the march forward. In “Exposure,” the thoughts darting back and forth are represented by a mix of iambs and trochees, with the most consistent line ironically being the machinegun fire: “Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.” (The stressed syllables are marked in bold.) By beginning the line with a stressed syllable and using a trochaic rhythm, Owen starts with a sharp sound and creates a staccato-like diction much akin to the rattling of a machinegun. The rhyming, too, emphasizes the uneasy atmosphere of the poem; whereas normal pair- or cross rhyming creates a sense of completeness and fulfillment, Owen does something quite different: In every stanza, lines 1+4 and 2+3 end with words that share consonants, but have different vowels, such as “silent – salient” and “knive us – nervous.” This uncommon form of rhyming is called pararhyme and leaves the reader with an edgy and incomplete feeling. Obviously, the purpose of Owen is to leave the reader in in an insecure, nervous state much like the soldiers in the frozen foxholes. To achieve this end, the use of a highly unorthodox manner of rhyming forces the reader to rethink his or her perceptions of what poetry – and preferably war – is.

In conclusion, “Exposure” reflects Wilfred Owen’s famous words that his subject was “War, and the Pity of War.” In particular, this poem asks the reader to pity and understand the hapless soldiers, even in situations where normal forces of nature nonchalantly become greater enemies than the German war machine. However, this is neither a sarcastic, snarky remark like Sassoon’s “Does it matter?”  nor a sharp attack on warmongers as in Owen’s own “Parable of the Old Man and the Young;” in spite of its thoroughly revised composition, “Exposure” is simply a vivid description of life for millions of young men during a so-called quiet period without any battles taking place. Owen does not lash out angrily, but tries to remind the civilian population that soldiers are to be pitied even when no deaths are reported in the news of the war, asking them to keep their hearths and hearts warm and open to the young men far away from home. It is a plea for understanding that will ring out true as long as mankind continues to wage war on itself.

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[1] Stanza 1, l. 2.

[2] Stanza 6, l. 5.

[3] Stanza 2, l. 4.

[4] Stanza 1, l. 1.

[5] Stanza 2, l. 1.

[6] Stanza 5, l. 1.

[7] Stanza 3, ll. 3-4.

[8] Stanza 2, l. 5.

[9] Stanza 6, l. 1.

[10] Stanza 7, l. 1.

[11] Stanza 7, l. 5.

[12] Stanza 8, l. 1.

[13] Stanza 2, ll. 2-3.

[14] Stanza 4, l. 2.

[15] Stanza 4, l.1.