A Post-Structuralist Analysis of Some of Wilfred Owen’s War Poems

This research article makes a Post-Structuralist study of seven of Wilfred Owen’s war poems: these are 'Futility", "Dulce et Decorum est", "Disabled", "Exposure", "The Show", and "Mental Cases”. Believing in the Post-Structuralist fact that language is not static but perpetually in process, and that the texts are plural, open to number of interpretations, this article makes an analysis of Owen's poems at political, psychological, religious, social, linguistic and syntactic levels. It takes into account Owen's images, metaphors and other literary techniques to prove that there is a range of possibilities of meanings inherent in texts. This study also intends to show that meanings are not fixed or given but are released with the range of possible readings. Literary theory rejects the classical methods of studying literature as obvious and natural and offers a method of reading which analyses, questions, evaluates, challenges and opens up the text to find out multiplicity of meanings. The theory which is under discussion is PostStructuralism. The major influence on Post-Structuralism are the works of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the cultural theorist Michel Foucault and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in its emergence. Derrida in his essay 'Structure, Sign and Play' discusses the main idea of PostStructuralism: as '...I wish to mark out and define structure-or rather the structurality of structurealthough it has always been involved, has always been neutralized or reduced and this by a process of giving it a center or * All quotations from the poems of Wilfred Owen are taken from Wilfred Owen: War Poems and Others ed. Dominic Hibberd, London: Chatto & Windus 1973. Explorations Volume 21 (2010) 56 referring it to a point of presence , a fixed origin' (Derrida 7). Derrida argues that Structuralism has not been able to free itself from this logocentric thinking and that in it meaning is conceived as existing independently of the language in which it is communicated and is thus not subject to the play of language. Whereas the Post-Structuralists emphasize that a literary text is written in language which is seen as a never ending chain of words and hence there are no definite and fixed meanings. In the words of Derrida '...it was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center has no natural locus, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions come into play' (Derrida 115). Deconstruction, postponement of meanings, binary opposition, removal of the author, metaphors and ambiguity are some of the key concepts of Post-