(Hurtig) Rettelse af Engelsk stil

Hej jeg er ikke speciel god til engelsk, og søger derfor en der lige hurtigt vil løbe den igennem.

Den skal som sagt bare rettes "hurtigt", detaljer er ikke vigtigt, bare at "the basic" er iorden.

Stilen:

Happy Birthday, 1951

The text” Happy Birthday, 1951” is written by Kurt Vonnegut, and is a short story from the book “Armageddon in Retrospect”. In this story we deal with an old man that tries to tech a six year old boy how the world should have been, different from what it is.

The story takes place in a German city. The title “Happy birthday, 1951” refers to 24 October 1951 where the U.S. President Harry Truman declares an official end to war with Germany. That also explain why the soldiers are pulling out of the city. People can’t live in the city without proper paper, and part of the proper paper work is a birth date, since the boy doesn’t have one, the man ask him when he wants his birthday to be. The man asks what he wants his birthday to be, the boy answer that the following day will work. As birthday present he decides that they are going a day away from soldiers and war. Since the boy was raised in that environment, he doesn’t seem to mind the war. The following day, they make it to the forest. While they are finding a perfect spot to sit, the boy sees a huge rusted tank. Quickly the tank gets the boys attention, and he’s asking if they can go to it. The man refuses, and as a respond the boy throws a rock at the tank. The man takes him deeper into the forest, and at last they find a perfect spot. To the boy, its seems lonely and he prefer the city with the soldiers. They lay down for a quick nap, and later the man wakes up alone, the boys is missing. He gets frustrating, that the boy maybe have had enough of him. But he’ll finds the boy in the old tank, playing a soldier.

All the basic information of the boy is unknown to us, not even a name. The only things we get to know is, that he in 1945, the end of the Second World War, a refugee woman pass a baby over to a man. Since it’s the end of Second World War his mother must have been German, since she is fleeing. His grow up in the city, were he lives with an old man in a secret hiding place. Cutten off from the outside of the world, the time in the hiding place has gone. They have got no inoculation, didn’t sworn any allegiance to the part of Germany they were living in, renounced or apologized for nothing, voted or marched.
The old man is frightened about the war and anything that has to do with it. That’s why he’s trying to protect the boy against it, trying to be a good father, but on first page he makes it clearly, he hasn’t been a good father, so maybe he’s just trying to make it up to the boy.
 

There is used a lot of symbolism, for example in P.9 L.106, were the forest is being compared with Eden. Eden as it was in the beginning, trees, sky and water. Another one is the boys cart; he keeps mixing the cart up with a tank. The old man corrects him all the times, and reminds him of that it’s a cart and not a tank. The boy has properly never seen a real cart before, and to him a tank is normal. So he keeps mixing it, to the old man’s great annoyance. Another example of symbolism is in P.9 L.91. Here Kurt Vonnegut describes the pine forest. “The centuries-old carpet of needles and green roof deadened the sounds floating up from the city”. The carpet, which is the ground covered by old needles, and the green roof, that are the top trees which closing all the war out. This is the old man’s favorite place. Later when the boy throws a rock at the tank, it’s being compared with a missile that fell toward the tank, and his just waiting for the tank to return the fire, but nothing happened since the tank is old and left behind.
 

“Happy Birthday 1951″ was interesting reading. The writer has let the story have some sort of a deeper meaning. It tells a future but the future is so riddled with war that when the next generation comes in, they think of war as normal and anything peaceful as “against nature.” Thus, if there ever is a peaceful moment, the kids start causing trouble just so that things are “normal” again.