The Thin Red Line

"Yes I would say so. It’s a much bigger canvas than the Red Badge , a book that Jones actually wrote a book report on when he was in training in Hawaii, after Pearl Harbor, but before he went to Guadalcanal, but in The Thin Red Line he looks at a number of characters and gets inside the heads of many of them. There’s this one in particular, Fife, who is obsessed with cowardice and worries about it incessantly. And there’s a line I want to discuss that expresses this very well: ‘somewhere in the back of each soldier’s mind, like a fingernail picking uncontrollably at a scabby sore was a small voice saying “but is it worth it, is it really worth it to die, to be dead, just to prove to everybody that you’re not a coward?”’ And so, there it is. The fear of cowardice. Many other students of the military have observed how common it is. At the back of the men’s minds the last thing holding them in place is just to prove to everybody that you’re not a coward. Listen to that line — ‘is it really worth it to die, to be dead.’ Jones is underrated as a prose stylist. To die is this quick thing that happens, but to be dead is an extended matter. It is quite the price to pay to ward off worries about cowardice. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And then Jones is also great when writing about how soldiers felt like numbers, because WWII was fought on such a huge scale. Some soldiers give voice to this idea that it’s just a giant business enterprise and that they are being asked to do things purely as if they’re data points. For instance they are told ‘go, go, take that hill’, not because we want that hill but because taking that hill will draw 40% of the enemy fire and then we can take another hill, and to be subject to that kind of actuarial manipulation of your so-called duty is really unnerving. Jones also talks about how the physiology of fear works, soldiers full of adrenaline, constricting blood vessels. He depicts soldiers as automatons: one of them sings ‘I am an automaton’ to the tune of ‘God Bless America’. It’s an update of Crane. Crane depicts Henry Fleming both fleeing from battle and participating in an attack – and the descriptions are almost identical. You see men crazed and running — it’s the same with supposed cowardice and courage, the only difference being their directions. Jones gets in with 20th century medical knowledge and examines the physiology of fear. And some of his characters are much more ironic and self-aware than young Henry. But both Jones and Crane call traditional ideas of courage and cowardice into question. It’s pretty chaotic in Crane, but we’re getting just a glimpse of one young man and it’s a much shorter book – it’s a miracle of concision, really. And it ends with Henry Fleming finding ‘a quiet manhood’. It says ‘he had been to touch the great death and found that after all it was but the great death, he was a man’. Something like that. Sort of a happy ending, you could say, though the end is much debated. Not moral certainty, but maybe there’s less moral uncertainty — or anyway Henry feels less uncertain about himself than he did at the beginning. Meanwhile The Thin Red Line ends with the men leaving the island where they’d done such battle, and the last line is ‘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.’ And so Jones has tried to write a book that was true to the experience of war as he saw it, but also knew that memory has a way of rosying things up. There’s a kind of amnesia. He wrote about it later in a book called World War II: A Chronicle of Soldiering — about that phenomenon, where soldiers can sit around an American legion hall and have beers and tell themselves it wasn’t that bad, and that they were autonomous individuals, when in fact The Thin Red Line usually is showing otherwise. He basically says: you’re so controlled, you’re on an island in the Pacific, you’re stuck, so cowardice in a way is impossible. And so he has a line about duty: ‘it wasn’t even a matter of duty, he had to go.’ Duty is this essential part of cowardice, but to be a duty there actually has to be some will involved. And there’s no will a lot of times in Jones’s depictions. And where there’s no will, no agency, a moral category like cowardice can’t apply."