ANTIPODAL FICTION
355
and then artificially reconstructed out of the author's prepossessions.
Mr. Jones is particularly successful in allowing relatively less articulate
people to express themselves fully without falsification.
Mr. Jones works best within the compass of small scenes which
would, if one ignored what takes place in between, add up to a vivid
and adroit panorama of Army life in pre-war Hawaii. The mortar that
keeps it together, however, crumbles rather easily into long, tedious
descriptions and interior monologues that often read like parodies of
half a dozen American novelists from Wolfe to Faulkner. He also splits
up his novel badly by trying to set in too broad a frame the epic of a
single individual and the saga of the aspirations of the pre-war enlisted
man. The latter task enables him to bring in much important, neglected
contemporary material, the grass roots and sidewalk cultures of America,
the sensibilities developed out of jazz, movies, sports, with their potent
closeness to experience, amazing refinement of perception and con–
ceptual weaknesses.
The major theme of
From Here to Eternity
is the conflict between
authority and the individual as expressed in the relations between the
officers and the more sentient enlisted men. The chief protagonist,
Robert Prewitt, is the son of a Harlan County coal miner who, qualified
for no place in American society, goes on the bum and drifts about
during the Depression till he ends up in the army and discovers his
vocation as a bugler. He determines to make a career of the army, to
become a "thirty-year man" and has visions of a pleasant, fulfilled life.
But a series of untoward events drive him toward ruin, the loss of his
rating and vocation, the guardhouse and finally death, "the martyr's
goal he had always known was his destiny."
Prewitt's martyrdom is not very convincing because of Mr. Jones's
inability or refusal
to
think through precisely what Prewitt is being
martyred for and what he is against. Prewitt is part
of
a small clan of
rebels, men who have enlisted out of inability or unwillingness to adapt
to middle-class mores and have a certain love for the army developed
out of the joys of
esprit de corps
and pleasure in its techniques and
rakehell, manly style of life. They also hate the army, chiefly because
of the petty politics, incompetence, sadism, and corruption of the
officers. All Mr. Jones's band of rebels fight desperately to prevent con–
formism and subservience from infiltrating their being, from emasculat–
ing them and destroying them as individuals.
Now, while it is not necessary for a novelist to espouse any clear–
cut doctrine, the events that take place in this novel require a good
deal of behind-the-scenes thinking about social problems if they are to
