11/9/2022 0 Comments Thin red lineIf it's fiction, the author must be very careful not to, unwillingly, transform his book in a re-telling of other, more commonly known battle events. There are always many characters, the ranks are confusing, the description of the battles must be very accurate otherwise the reader will be lost. It's difficult to write a book about soldiers at war. I appreciated the measure of emotional distance because otherwise the (sometimes graphic) death, destruction, and mayhem would have been painful to read. Although this is a novel about characters, it does not let the reader get sentimentally attached to them. The last line sums it up: "One day one of their number would write a book about all this, but none of them would believe it, because none of them would remember it that way." Mailer gives us subhuman characters cast as soldiers Jones helps us appreciate the humanity that survives even in the most degrading circumstances. The theme of the book is the diversity of those responses. Canny or confused, each one strives to make sense of the war and of his own responses. They display independent thought (rational or not) and realistic emotions (alternately strained and dampened by the extremity and exhaustion of battle). But Jones' characters are realistically human. The soldiers in The Thin Red Line face the same experiences as Mailer's characters. The soldiers, not really human to start with, are manipulated and degraded by the military machine. Norman Mailer's novel uses the war as a vehicle to preach a message about hypocricy and corruption at the core of American culture. But under the surface, the novels could not be more different. Each novel tell the stories of a group of inexperienced soldiers sent as cannonfodder to fight the Japanese on a lonely Pacific island. James Jones draws the title of this book from the "thin red line between the sane and the mad." But the subtitle gives a clearer sense of the theme - "every man fights his own war." On the surface, The Thin Red Line is strikingly similar to The Naked and the Dead.
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