Characters

Besides the speaker, the characters depicted in “Eve of Destruction” by P. F. Sloan are people from both America and Eastern Asia, mostly those directly involved in the Vietnam War. There is, however, an invisible presence in the poem, that of the person whom the narrator addresses.

The speaker and anonymous person

The speaker is an unnamed person, probably a persona of P. F. Sloan himself. The entire text of the poem represents the narrator’s view on the dramatic situation that concerns the entire planet, namely the Vietnam War.

The speaker addresses an anonymous person, indicated through the pronoun “you”: “You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’” (p. 45, l. 3)

The above line indicates that the speaker might address a man of 18, a person who is not legally allowed to vote yet, but who is, ironically enough, seen as a perfect soldier. The narrator’s address to this unnamed person takes the form of an apostrophe, ...