Literature Analysis #2

1.) Exposition: This story is about a team of Navy Seals that have a mission to eliminate a target that is part of Al Qaeda. This Navy Seal is deployed and is supposed to do just do recon on a leader in the Taliban but it turns into a lot more than just that. While they are hiding they are discovered by some mountain herders that would go tell the rest of the village that they were they, so they are forced to make a decision. They can either tie up the herders to slow them down or they can kill them to save themselves. After they talk it over and begin to really get upset about what they should do, they ultimately decide to tie them up and then get away as fast as possible. This proves to be the wrong decision when they do not get away fast enough and are then surrounded by the Taliban. This is when the firefight begins and since they are trained they kill a lot more Taliban but they are outnumbered and are forced to jump down a cliff multiple times. Every time they jump down the cliffs to avoid being shot at they get very injured and the narrator talks about he was really lucky that his gun landed right next to him every time that he fell down the cliffs even though he lost a lot of other things. Eventually the narrators entire team is killed in the fire fight and the only reason that he lives is because he hides from them under a rock. The narrator is then found and is secretly taken care of by the villagers. While he builds up his strength and recovers he is taken care of by many of the children. Eventually the village rises up and pushes out the Taliban and then the narrator is able to be rescued.
2.) The theme of this novel is to never give up even when everything else is going to hell. We see this message throughout the story and especially when one of the seal team members dies. Every time the narrator loses one of his team members he does not give up but seems to want to survive even more for them. Even at the end when it seems like he is going to give up under the rock he is saved by the villagers which shows that sometimes people we don't expect us can end up helping us the most.
3.) The author's tone seems kind of reminiscent and sorrowful because he is looking back on this terrible event that happened. He talks about how he is amazed that they died because Navy Seals were supposed to be invincible but obviously they aren't. He also constantly talked about how hard it was to keep going while his partners were all dying.
4.) The author uses direct characterization mainly to characterize all of the characters. At the beginning of the story he directly tells the audience what each character is like and how they act and what their job is in the team. Through out the story some of these characterizations are proven through the actions that the characters do when they are in this unbelievable situation.
5.) The main character, which is the narrator, is definitely a dynamic character because this traumatic experience changes him. At the beginning he thought that they were so well trained that they really had nothing to fear but by the end reality hit him. Their training helped them but definitely did not make them invincible like they thought it did. The narrator also learned how hard his job could actually be and why he was trained the way that he was.
6.) After the story was over I felt like I had met every single one of the seal team members. The narrator went into great detail about each character and what kind of person they were like. He then proved it all in the story he was telling so you really got a sense of what the characters were like which made them very realistic.