Wells Tower is a powerful writer who takes an abstract approach to exploring the complexity of relationships and bonds between men and women, parents and children, and just people in general. It created a world of rough men whose lives usually don't go their way and also of strong women who had to endure more trouble and stress than anyone could imagine. These themes are particularly present in his short story "All Ravaged, All Burnt", which chronicles the life of a barbaric Viking nation that lives to destroy and devastate other, smaller nations. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In "All Ravaged, All Burnt" the story is told from the point of view of Harald, who is also the narrator. In the first two lines of the story Harald explains that their people have suffered crop damage and "dragons", and they blame these natural events on a Norwegian monk named Naddod. He says "We all know who he was" referring to the monk. After much thought, Harald, not wanting to leave his wife, agrees to go with the other Vikings to the island where Naddod is, to kill him and stop the madness. It seems that almost every man in his clan has had some problem with a wife or woman. Djarf, who was the leader of their ship and a "war madman", has no problem leaving his wife for months at a time and she doesn't seem to mind either, this is made clear in the story, "So Djarf, whose wife was a a sour thing, with a mouth like a carp and not inclined to stay at home, he was agitated to get back on the ship and go to sort things out in Northumbria.”. Another example of their problems with women is Harald's friend, Gnut , "His wife had died years ago, died from bad milk, and now that she was gone, the part of Gnut that felt at peace in a place that didn't move beneath him had gotten sick and is." he is also dead. After his wife's death, all he likes to do now is argue. Another theme presented several times in the story is gruesomeness and rituals or barbaric acts, which are expected in a story about Vikings, but still. are important. Our first encounter with this is when we learn Djarf's story, he explains that he comes from a place where people take a sick pleasure in the macabre sides of life and also says: "They have a habit over there if they don't" like the looks of a child when he comes out of the womb, they throw him into the abyss and wait for the next one. This means throwing a newborn baby into the ocean as if it were just a rock. Another example of the clan's barbaric nature is made clear when Djarf finds Naddod and, almost instantly, cuts open his stomach but leaves him alive on the ground. At this point Gnut turns to Harald and says "Oh, Lord, are you making a blood eagle?" “Yes,” I said. "It looks like this."" Then Djarf proceeds to cut open his back and rip out his lungs, all while he's still alive. You can tell it's normal for them and no one bats an eye, Djarf even tells the kids to listen and learn, teaching them how play the “blood eagle” and everyone seems fascinated instead of disgusted.Synthesis/ResearchWells Tower is an award-winning author who debuted his career in 2009 with the release of his collection of short stories entitled “All devastated, all burned.” Tower's interest in sociology and anthropology, both of which he earned degrees from Wesleyan University in, blends with his MFA in narrative writing from Columbia University “Make his stories seem as if they were case studies taken from an ongoing relationship study" (Schiffman) . His typical writing style deals with aspects such as excessive drinking, cheating,fights, etc. and, in Sam Anderson's words on Tower, "He is, like his great forebears, a connoisseur of violence." His stories in “Everything Wasted, Everything Burned” depict the reality of life, sometimes sad but always shocking. From Viking warriors to envious teenage girls, this book has it all. Schiffman proposes that "A strong sense of longing permeates all of these stories: longing for something more, something lost, or something unlikely to ever be found." Which is itself a kind of dark interpretation and seems to present that there is hope for something but in reality nothing will ever happen. The title story in his collection takes a different approach than other stories that vaguely portray contemporary Americans. This story is very unusual and it's strange that it takes a completely different approach to the other stories, instead of a moody teenager or a middle-aged man whose life is falling apart, the characters in this story are a boatload of ready Vikings to plunder a defenseless island. After reading the title story and realizing that it is nowhere near the plots of the other stories in his book, the question arises: why did he put that story there? Or because that story only concerns the Vikings and not contemporary America? When asked about this in an interview with Michael Carroll, Tower said: “The story of the Vikings, there's a lot of violence in it, but it's kind of burlesque. All I was really trying to do with that totally over-the-top, grotesque, gory stuff was show it as a counterpoint to this everyday alienation of these basic Vikings' lives. (Carroll 4) This means that it was just an absurd exaggeration of the Vikings and all it was doing was countering today's view of the Vikings. Also he could have put the story of the Vikings in the collection to make the book more interesting, contemporary America can get boring after a while, so it would help the reader stay interested if they were reading a story about the Vikings raiding an island and killing all those who are there. It's also worth noting that nowadays people are intrinsically interested in Viking-type stories and modern stories that depict ancient times and violence. There are so many shows and movies today that deal with Renaissance era stories, one of the most popular is Game of Thrones, which is a fantasy/sci-fi television show that portrays a fictional world full of Viking-style people and barbarians. . What's even stranger is the fact that these barbaric people of the Viking Age speak in the same middle-class American dialect used in all the other stories and that it's not much different from how we speak today. Tower's syntax and use of colloquial language make the story very easy to follow while still providing plenty of detail. She also has a wide range of voices she can write in: “Tower can write with equal power about young women and boys; it's about hell-raising, skull-splitting ancient Vikings and a 21st-century housebound old watcher, and even a cheerful, easy-going pedophile. (White) this shows his versatility as a writer, and he does a good job in all of them. In Tower's book, all but one of the stories depict a contemporary America with somewhat normal problems. A man gets caught cheating, a boy has a horrible stepfather he hates, a boy hiding from a bully are all issues that people can relate to, but Tower uses these issues and then presents a bigger issue, usually even darker. In one of the stories in his book "On the show" a child hides from a bully and while he hides he is "found by a monster worse than anyother thing in the haunted house." (Barr) and his father doesn't believe him. This theme has an inversion in the Viking story, where their problems are very different, bad crops and weather, pillaging gone wrong, a friend who gets stabbed from a child and then kills the child, etc. while they are Vikings and are dealing with many different circumstances than the protagonists of the other stories, they still have some of the same type of problems such as problems with wives or women in general The central theme of all the stories is the representation of contemporary America, and it would be strange if only one story did not mReligion as an aspect of the Pledge of Allegiance