Topgun: An American Story and the Short Story

Topgun: An American Story was a book written by Dan Peterson, a retired naval captain of the United States Navy. It was an autobiography of himself, developing the US Navy Fighter Weapons School, which is very well known as the Topgun.

Peterson wrote the book using first-person perspective, which was different comparing to my short story, that I have used third-person perspective. This can let the audience get to know more about Peterson himself, and to understand the story more easily through Peterson's view. The book recorded his services in the Navy and how he established Topgun with eight other fellow aviators in a very detailed way, and my short story is like a small chapter from his long novel. 

Peterson used some literacy technics to express his experiences in the military. It is no doubt that he has used symbolism in his book. For example, he used "The Khmer Rouge"  when he described the communist party of Vietnam during war. He also used "the Big E" to represent the USS Enterprise (CVN-65), where Peterson was deployed onboard with his fighter squadron VF-92 in 1968. As we can see, Peterson used symbolism by using the nicknames to represent different parties or ships.

Peterson also used metaphor to describe the scene. He used "the wild card" to refer to the unknowns in the battle, and from the phrase "before we could teach our material we had to study and learn it cold ourselves", we can understand that "learn it cold" refers to the tutors of the Topgun has to understand the materials very detailed. 

He did use imagery as well. He wrote " the second (ejection from the fighter jet) was harrowing in the extreme", which means one of his weapon officer was suffering from strong pain after the second ejection. He used the phrase "as the rotor wash sprayed me with salt water, the helo crew hauled me heavenward" to describe his happiness being rescued from ejection. 

As it is a long autobiography, we can see that Peterson had used a lot of different literacy languages. 

Reference list

Pedersen, D. (2019), TOPGUN, Hachette UK. Available at: https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=NjmRDwAAQBAJ&pg=GBS.PT16, Accessed 13 Apr. 2024.

Comments

  1. Zoe Van-de-Velde24 April 2024 at 04:31

    Good that you have looked at another work and compared this contextually to your own, well done as this shows some understanding of the writing itself.

    ReplyDelete

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