Sample Essay On War And Peace: A Comparative Essay

On ‘Vermeer in Bosnia’ and ‘The Lives of a Flaneur’

If one would examine Aleksandar Hemon’s “The Lives of a Flaneur” and Lawrence Weschler’s “Vermeer in Bosnia,” the most glaring similarity is that they both recount the war in Bosnia and to such extent, its after-effects. However, if we were to go beyond what is obvious, we would be able to notice that both essays talks about the resiliency of humans in the face of extreme pressure. Hemon demonstrated this by what he saw after the war as well as through the attitudes of the people around him upon his return to Saravejo, Bosnia’s capital city. On the other hand, Weschler’s approach was more indirect. Weschler used Vermeer’s paintings as an analogy and as a point of comparison to what he was trying to say. Nevertheless, both writers had admitted in their essays that even they were surprised by the capability of a human to hope and to envision peace.
Weschler mentioned in his essay how Vermeer was able to find an outlet of peace through his paintings. The exact quote was, “At a tremendously turbulent juncture in the history of his continent, he had been finding – and, yes, inventing – a zone filled with peace, a small room, an intimate visionand then breathing it out.” Similarly, Hemon recounted how his teta-Jozefina had always said that there were good in men, even the ones who blast holes in their apartment with their bullets. Another example from Hemon’s essay was the fact that mortar-shell marks that lined the city were transformed into something beautiful by just adding red paint.
Indeed, the idea of both essays only fortifies the fact that humans do not crumble under pressure. Humans bend and are molded. In the end, peace will always be present, even in war.