remains - simon armitige

• context

  → Written for “The Not Dead” on Channel 4, to raise awareness on PTSD

  → Loosely based on the experiences of Guardsman Tromans, a soldier in the 2003 Iraq War

  → Seeks to highlight the unseen effects of war by exploring the psychological affect on soldiers, and criticises the typical presentation of war as glorious or noble

  → Came at a time of changing opinions on war

  → Armitage presents conflict as more visceral and real than those who came before him

  → Exposes lack of support for soldiers in need, and the inner humanity of people often viewed as emotionless and stoic
• guilt - “probably armed possibly not”

  → Anaphora of “probably armed, possibly not” repeated throughout shows how he is still wracked with doubt and guilt, as if the man

  → Begins with “probably” as that is what the speaker wants to believe

  → Sliver of doubt remains in “possibly not”

  → A cyclical structure shows how he keeps coming back to this doubt

  → His guilt is the crux of his suffering
• guilt - “his bloody life, in my bloody hands”

  → “his bloody life, in my bloody hands”

  → Adjective bloody could hold a double meaning; literal blood from the barbaric death or as means of cursing

  → Echoes Macbeth – “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean”

  → Blood is a motif of guilt in both

  → Root cause of soldier’s suffering is guilt
• guilt - “myself and somebody else and somebody else”

  → Contrast between “my bloody hands” + “myself and somebody else and somebody else”

  → Gradually coming to terms with his culpability + guilt rather than shifting blame

  → Colloquial language shows how soldiers are expected to remain stoic + brave

  → “myself and somebody else and somebody else”

  → Attempt to syntactically cram sentence with other individuals in order to shift the blame being solely on him
• dehumanised instruments of war - “Three of a kind”/“all of the same mind”


  → War causes soldiers to lose their humanity

  → shows they are all conditioned to be the same

  → “three of a kind” could be a reference to poker - all these events are just a game to soldiers

  → “A kind” demonstrates how war has stripped away their individuality and uniqueness from them as humans as there Is nothing to separate them now
• dehumanised instruments of war- “sort of inside out”

  → “Sort of inside out,” “bloody“ “i swear” “legs it” when referring to dead bodies

  → Soldiers have become deadened and desensitised to the horror of war

  → Colloquial language shows how these occurrences are commonplace

  → Expected to hide emotions by being tough and having a stoic exterior façade
• dehumanised instruments of war- “sun stunned”/“sand smothered”


  → Sibilance of ‘S’ sound mimics bullets

  → Soldier’s suffering is never-ending
• structure - enjambment

  → Enjambment “I swear / I see every round”

  → Unable to separate events

  → Trauma causes continuous dialogue

  → Mirror how memories mix into present mental frame

  → Key moments: death & suffering

  → Suffering breaks him as well as structure
• structure - caesura

  → Caesura “Then I’m home on leave. But I blink”

  → Provides a false sense of finality

  → Conjunction “but” emphasises there is always more and his suffering is never over, it pervades home life

  → Reflects how flashbacks interrupt his life

  → Forces the reader to stop and think
• form - dramatic monologue

  → Dramatic monologue and present tense

  → Traumatic account from memory

  → Shift in perspective reflects coming to terms with guilt
• form - regular quatrains

  → Highlight regularity of PTSD and rigid, unrelenting control it has

  → Last stanza is only 2 lines, contrasting previous regularity

  → Emphasises disintegration of mind

  → Breaking free from control of guilt

  → A semblance of hope for the future