Tim O'Brien

"And the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility."

This is a passage from Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Actually, it is not the full sentence. He wrote it to be almost a paragraph long to illustrate the ongoing everyday march of a soldier in the Vietnam war.  To put it all up at once would have been overkill, and I resonated most with the end of it, so the last few lines is what we have here. I love this because he reduces war to a way of walking just as soldiers had to do to survive it. Their dehumanization of the war was their only defense against the horrors they experienced, but, as the author points out, that defense is what allows atrocity to continue unchecked.  

O'Brien's use of diction is what achieves a sense of reduction. The contrast between the word "war" with all of its complex connotation and the words "posture" and "carriage" is huge. By juxtaposing them and saying one is entirely a matter of the other degrades an action taking place on a global scale down to the way one human being carries himself.

I also really enjoy the way this sentence is structured. Beginning with a conjunction still feels like a rebel move to me even though it can grammatically work, and I like that. It grabs my attention. The rhythmic listing between conjunctions or commas is another technique I like, but here it has special significance. The rhythm is like slow trudging steps like the speaker is punctuating each word with a step, and the effect is that these huge concepts like hope and human sensibility diminish into walking again.

Imitation:

And school became entirely a matter of pen moving on paper, the work was everything, a kind of coma, a kind of laziness, a dulled sense of creativity and consciousness and passion and pride and intellectual daring.