“Disabled” and Alienation

            In Daniel Pigg’s “Owen’s ‘Disabled’” he analyzes the impact Owen’s war participation had on his poetry. These experiences lead Owen to distancing himself from society and elicited images of estrangement. The author points to the word choice of ‘queer’ in line 13 of the poem. He states that it implies a sense of detachment because of the loss of the soldier’s legs and how the girls now touch him, like a disease. Pigg states that the underlying meaning of the line creates the sense of detachment by making “the male body strange, unfamiliar, undesirable, and unknowable.” He goes further into the analyzation by stating that society has caused this sense of alienation because of the ambiguous meaning of queer.

Pigg goes on to state that there are five different sections of the poem that function as pieces of the soldier’s life that show his alienation from himself and from society. The first section is setting the stage for understanding the soldier.  The author shows that the sense of recollection creates a tone of gloom and loneliness. The second section also includes past experiences in the soldier’s life pre-injury. These lines develop a separation between the solider and everyone else. Pigg’s third section is distinction between the soldier’s youth and his life with his injury. It is concentrated on bodily perceptions. The poem continues, according to Pigg, with the soldier’s reasons for joining the war and his emotions. The author reasons that the poem is closed with an even more alienating sense of separation between him and the women; “his injury has drained him of the socially constructed masculine image, and now he is estranged and detached.”