E. L. Doctorow's Blue Collar Characters That Are Highly Literate Baby
Some of my favorite books are war novels. One of my first "big" books (300+ pages) was a fortuitous detect on my school's library shelves: Newberry Winner Rifles for Watie. I loved that book. I did not realize at the fourth dimension, but it was my starting time introduction to a more nuanced agreement of the Civil State of war than the traditional southern "Lost Cause" mythology that seems to go passed downwards nearly past osmosis to those who grow up in the American South.
I read a few other novels fix during the Ceremonious War as a child, but mostly moved on to other things. In my teens, I read some war novels, usually set in Vietnam, and Clancy'southward military-techno-thrillers (my mother brought home The Hunt for Red Oct for my brother and me; we loved it). Every bit an developed, my experience with "state of war novels" includes these favorites: A Good day to Arms, Shambles Five, Killer Angels, and Catch-22.
At the fourth dimension I read Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, I would non have consciously idea of what a "war novel" would or should wait like. Most of the novels I had read to that signal, nonetheless, had been told from the grunt's signal of view and had taken the reasonable view that state of war is hell. Killer Angels has a different feel, as explained by D.G. Meyers in his interesting review of Killer Angels. In the review, Meyers argues that Shaara freshly demonstrated with his novel that "a war novel need not be a 'trauma novel.'"
Killer Angels is told virtually exclusively from the officers' point of view, rather than from the grunts' point of view. This does make for a different sort of "war novel." I think Meyers makes a good bespeak. He closes by proverb "there has been no other novel like it in forty years."
While The March is not exactly like Killer Angels in elevating the war to "a conflict of strategies and philosophies – a continuation of policies rather than an uninterrupted anarchy", East.L. Doctorow perhaps learned something from that before book. Doctorow gives us multiple views upwards and downwardly the concatenation of command, both within and outside the military. And though The March is unlikely to leave you feeling that war is anything other than hell, it also recognizes and gives homage to the strategies and philosophies motivating the conflict.
Doctorow achieves this latter outcome past drafting into his cause actual participants in Sherman'southward march through the South, including almost prominently, Full general Sherman himself. Several other historical figures, including President Lincoln and General Grant, are included in Doctorow'due south big cast of characters. The character of Sherman is embellished with idiosyncrasies such as insomnia and dislike of conventional beds. Doctorow's President Lincoln is perchance a bit too hallowed by the other characters, wringing visible sympathy from the normally cold Wrede Sartorius. Still, Doctorow must take extensively researched his material because he, like Shaara, is able to explicate and convey both the armed services strategy and the military tactics of the battles he relates.
If you are not familiar with the American Ceremonious State of war, General Sherman took over as Union commander in the Western Theater of the state of war when General Grant was elevated from that post to general-in-principal of the Union Ground forces in 1864. General Sherman captured Atlanta on September ii, 1864. His victory helped secure Lincoln's election to a 2nd term.
From there, Sherman followed a "hard war" policy while marching southeast through Georgia to Savannah and and then upward through the Carolinas. Sherman's "hard war" consisted of destroying the Confederacy's infrastructure and, he hoped, eviscerating the Confederacy'southward will to continue the fight.
The March opens from the point of view of a southern plantation owner, John Jameson, preparing his family for flight equally General Sherman is start his march from Atlanta to the Atlantic coast. The slaves are left backside. The near important of those to the novel is Pearl, a young female person slave who, by outward appearance, is white. We soon learn that she is the girl of John Jameson. Sherman'due south army does become to the plantation and Lieutenant Clarke finds Pearl:
Her chin lifted, she regarded him as if she were the mistress of the house. She couldn't accept been more than than twelve or thirteen, barefoot, in a plain apron to her knees, but caped by the shawl into a shockingly regal young woman. Before he could say anything, she darted by him and down the stairs. He caught a glimpse of smooth white calves, the shawl flying backside her.
Clarke and his men fire downward the plantation and pillage everything of value. When they go out, the slaves become with them, there being no shelter or nutrient remaining. Pearl stands apart from the other slaves who have piled into wagons and joined the procession. Clarke sees her and pulls her up on his horse. With this, Pearl is pulled into the march to stay.
It would take too long to properly innovate all the other major characters, so I will summarize. Lieutenant Clarke'due south storyline soon intersects with that of 2 Confederates slated for hanging past their own side. The older, contemptuous, and cunning Arly fell asleep at his postal service, while the young, naïve, homesick Will deserted. Before the march has reached Savannah, Will and Arly will have switched sides several times. Emily Thompson is the girl of a respected Judge and, somewhen, joins the march as a nurse for Europe-educated Colonel Wrede Sartorius. Sartorius is a brilliant, if somewhat cold, army surgeon. In fact, he is the most respected surgeon in the Union. Perhaps, in Doctorow's rendering, he is a little also brilliant.
Even then, Sartorius is a specially interesting character. While not uncaring, his sympathy is about exclusively expressed as efficiency. A typical prove of his pity is the amputation of a limb in 9 seconds, a Union army best. His sex scene will send shivers through anyone with a modicum of romance. He is dissected all-time, perhaps, in these lines:
It is a cold, dark life, the life of principled feeling.
Sartorius is a principled homo and his principles all serve to advance medical science. In i example, he refuses to operate on Albion Simms, a soldier with a spike on his head and, instead, takes him along on the march to written report his deterioration. Albion Simms loses his memory along the way:
Yes. That is why my head hurts. It's always now. That's what hurts. Who did you say I was?
Albion Simms.
No, I can't recall. There is no remembering. It'south always now.
Are you crying?
Yeah. Because information technology's always now. What did I but say?
It's always at present.
Aye.
Albion, in tears, held his bar and nodded. So he rocked himself back and forth, back and forth. It'southward always now, he said. Information technology'southward always now.
This patient and his condition act equally a metaphor for the march and war. In war, Doctorow points out, it is always now.
But to give any thought of the scope of the novel, I should mention the many other characters. Wilma Jones and Coalhouse Walker are slaves freed by Sherman'due south army who meet and attempt to survive by following the march. Coalhouse is the father of a grapheme in another of Doctorow's novels. Roscoe is a distinguished black slave to John Jameson. Jameson's wife Mattie searches for her 2 Confederate soldier sons. Then there is the lensman Josiah Culp and his assistant Calvin Harper who take a run-in with Arly and Will.
Gen. Judson Kilpatrick is a dandy and heads 1 of Sherman'southward cavalry units, seducing and being seduced forth the march. Stephen Walsh is a Matrimony soldier who finds his mode through to Colonel Sartorius's surgery. Hugh Pryce is an English journalist who becomes involved in events which hinders his reporting. And there are numerous other minor characters. From Generals to slaves to "white trash", Doctorow examines all strata of those affected by the march.
Yet, while each of these characters is important, the story is not about whatever detail graphic symbol. The story is well-nigh the march. When Sherman muses at the march's terminate:
Though this march is done, and well accomplished, I think of it now, God aid me, with longing – not for its claret and death merely for the bestowal of significant to the very ground trod upon, how it fabricated every field and swamp and river and road into something of moral event, whereas at present, every bit the march dissolves so does the meaning, the regular army strewing itself into the isolated intentions of diffuse private life, and the terrain thereby left blank and also diffuse, and ineffable, a thing in one case over again, and victoriously, without reason, and, whether diurnally lit and darkened, or sere or fruitful, or raging or calm, completely insensible and without any purpose of its own.
And why is Grant so solemn today upon our keen achievement, except he knows this unmeaning inhuman planet will need our warring imprint to requite it value, and that our civil war, the devastating manufacture of the basic of our sons, is but a state of war afterward a state of war, a war before a war.
This hearkens dorsum to Albion Simms and his condition. In war, as with Simms, it is always now. Immediate survival and, hence, immediate gratification are the primary aims of the participants and those defenseless upwards in its horrors. Arly and Will exemplify that approach. Their sympathies lie with the Due south, but, in the ever now war, they volition put on any compatible is virtually conducive to survival. For generals, though, their own survival is rarely an issue. They accept bigger goals which become their "always now". The devouring fauna of war is a means not simply to an end, merely to meaning.
Source: https://hungrylikethewoolf.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/the-march-by-e-l-doctorow/
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