Customer Reviews

Three soldiers

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Dos Passos's attempt to expose the reader to the plight of the common American enlisted man in WWI rarely manages to achieve the impact one suspects he must have been seeking. It's not about the horrors of battle at all--the three soldiers of the title encounter no real fighting, and half the book takes place after the armistice. Rather, the book is about the horrors inflicted on the minds and spirits of men by the military machine and its inhuman procedures. Dos Passos does this by bludgeoning the reader with the endless drudgery of the soldiers' existence as they meet in boot camp and make their way to France. His three soldiers as clearly meant to cut across the strata of American society: Italian-American San Franciscan, Midwestern farm boy, Harvard-educated pianist, and he clearly shows how they all get ground down and reduced to nothing by the army. In doing so, the book becomes more of an anti-war, pro-personal freedom manifesto than it is a story with a plot. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just isn't done very delicately and thus makes for a rather tedious read. In the end, it's clear why this is considered a rather minor work by an American great.

I probably shouldn't have read this after the great and mighty USA trilogy since anything else he did only pales to that great work but this is a fine, if little known work from a great writer. As people who have read the USA trilogy know, Dos Passos absolutely hated WWI and everything it stood for and here he got to take out his anger on a few targets. While not as focused as 1919 was, he shows his feelings with a deft touch and a depth of feeling that was rarely seen in war novels, his characters aren't all brilliant, the only really three dimensional one is Andrews but they depict a cross section of American life and through their adventures he shows what his firm belief was: that the machine of the army sucked the spirit out of someone and turned them nearly into a automaton. And without focused on the gory battles, he shows the horror of the war in a way that few writers have. Definitely a book that needs to be looked at again and should be ranked with The Naked and the Dead, and Red Badge of Courage (among others).

To read this novel as a war novel is a mistake. World War I is mearly the canvas upon which Dos Passos paints his story. If individuals have a responsibility to their government, what responsibility does that same individual have to his/her own conscience? "Three Soldiers" attempts to answer this question. As with most great works of literature, the story can be read on two levels.

At the surface you have the stories of three men with different desires of who and what they want to be. There is a theme of Socialism and anti-war here as well. It's a good story at the surface level. What makes this novel great, however, is that there is an underlying message here, wrought with symbolism. It's the study of the awakening of the individual and the choices he (John Andrews) makes. It's a study of moral courage in the face of insurmountable odds.

John Andrews (the central character) initially joins the army out of a sense of duty, then begins to recognize how he has been stripped of all who he was and has begun to conform to the "machine" of society. Disgusted, he takes his first tentative steps back toward who he really is at heart. The moment of epiphany comes when, after having been wounded and waking up in a make-shift hospital surrounded by busts of great men of the past, he decides that he must make his stand to change the world in what ever way he can just like the men represented in the busts above him did. His choices eventually drive him to desert the army while in Paris. The real choice comes near the end of the novel when he is presented the opportunity to return to the army with no consequence to his prior desertion. (I won't ruin the ending for you!)

There is a strong element of socialist propoganda in the novel. I am no more a socialist than I am a horse, but the reader should remember that this novel was written before the failings of socialism were widely known. It was a much more idealisic time and the evils and harshness of socialism had yet to be realized. The socialist element of the novel need not deter the reader from the true message: the courage and triumph of individual freedom.

The Signet Classic publication of John Dos Passos' brilliant anti-war novel provides us access to another significant account of the Great War and the writings of this `lost generation' novelist. Although first released over seventy-six years ago, the novel's timeless message relating the effects of war and military life on the psyches of three young men is as relative today as in 1921. Dos Passos' indictment of the war and America's role in it, contrasts starkly with the crusade like image of the War presented to the American people. The novel accurately reflects the diversity of a conscript army embodied in the three soldiers; a first generation Italian-American from San Francisco, an Indiana farm boy and an east coast Harvard man. Each enters the service with confidence in the role they would play in this clash between good and evil. The transformation of these young men carries through until the end of the war. Although, they all survive there is little left of their former selves. The brilliance of the language and the depth of feeling demonstrated by the author will captivate the reader. This novel rightly belongs alongside cumming's The Enormous Room, Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and Hemingway's Farewell to Arms

"Three Soldiers" is John Dos Passos before he found his voice. With the originality of style and narrative punch of "Manhattan Transfer" and "USA" still a few years away, this overlooked writer gave us a good look at the common soldier during and after World War I that is well-written but which occasionally gets bogged down with repetition and the lack of a storyline. Yeah, I know, the repetition and social slavery of the soldier are part of what Dos Passos is trying to get across, but that doesn't make portions like the interminable "The World Outside" section any easier to read. This is probably only considered a classic because of what Dos Passos wrote later. I guess I was expecting World War I to play a larger role, but it really is only a backdrop; there is almost no actual fighting in the entire book, and the novel is less than half over when the war ends (a shame, it was just starting to gather momentum). If you're going to write about the war, at least let us experience some of its horrors with the characters. Still, it is generally a good book, the writing is fine and insightful if, again, a little redundant (the constant description of colors -- the night, nature, etc., got a bit old). But quite nice and recommended as a way to be led into his better works.

John Dos Passos was one of the few to tackle all these themes in one work, the gigantic USA. In Three Soldiers, an early novel set during the war before Weimar, he draws on personal experience to capture the clackety-clack of the war-machine. As in his masterwork, he uses popular song and bittersweet evocations of innocent youth in the face of ruthless power to trace the breaking of young men's dreams. With his elaborate narrative structures and seemingly effortless prose he shows that it is not just war that requires the suppression of liberty but modern industrial society too. But unlike the greatest first world war novel Journey To The End Of The Night there are signposts here of socialist paths that led far away from dystopia.

The three soldiers to whom the title refers are Dan Fuselli, a working class Italian-American from San Francisco, "Chris" Chrisfield, an Indiana farm-boy, and John Andrews, from New York, the novel's main protagonist. All three went into the U.S. Army during the first world war and met during basic training. While Fuselli's big dream is to become a corporal and Chris just wants to get to the front to kill German soldiers, Andrews wants to become an accomplished musician and composer. Andrews is by no means a coward and does not shirk combat, but after the armistice is declared he has great difficulty taking orders from his superiors. As Andrews tells his French girlfriend, "every order shouted at me, every new humiliation before the authorities, was as great an agony to me." Andrews had managed to get permission from an officer for a School Detachment, which meant that he would be allowed to study music. He, instead, proceeds in a series of inexplicable misbehaviors to throw it all away.

_Three Soldiers_ is a colorfully written and probably fairly accurate study of various men's reactions to military life and the kind of discipline and regimentation inherent in that type of life. While many found it difficult to adjust to what they saw as a form of slavery, some of these soldiers chose to desert, believing they could eventually blend in with the civilian population on the European continent. Finding a French woman to marry seemed an easy solution. John Andrews was an intelligent, sensitive, well-educated and sophisticated young man. He even spoke French fluently. That he so capriciously chose the path that he did made absolutely no sense to me at all in this otherwise gripping and likable novel.

John Dos Passos was the son of a Chicago attorney. He was born in 1894 living until 1970. He is most famous for his "USA Trilogy" and "Manhatten Transfer." The work under review is "Three Soldiers" set in the waning months and early years following World War I. It concerns:
1. Dan Fusseli a poor uneducated Italian-American from San Francisco who dreams of becoming a corporal, winning the hand of the girl back home and fighting the Germans. He realizes none of these modest goals.
2. Chris Chrisfield is a farmer from rural Indiana who murders a mean sergeant named Anderson. He deserts the American army following the war while stationed in Paris. He often dreams he is back home again in Indiana.
3. John Andrews like author Dos Passos is a Harvard graduate. He is a musician who is bored by the deadly mindless tedium of the army. He also deserts the army, meets a sophisticated Parisian woman and falls in love with a French barmaid. He is captured on the last page of the novel facing at least 20 years in Leavenworth for desertion.
It is manifest that Dos Passos has used the three main characters to represent the different geographical regions of the United States. The characters differ in their educational levels. All three musketeers become very disillusioned with America, the US Army and the government.
These characters mirror Dos Passos's hatred of war which he developed while serving a brief time in France during the war. At this time he was also infatuated with communism and the radical left wing of the political spectrum. The book reminds me of TS Eliot's "Wasteland" poem put into no-nonesense prose by the Harvard Midwestern author.
There is little plot development in the novel. Anyone expecting to read of World War I combat will be disappointed since no battle scenes are given. The regiment in the story does not get a chance to participate in the gory battles of that horrendous war.
Dos Passos is good at vivid descriptions and the inner feelings of his characters. We sense the boredom, fatigue and war weariness of the men involved. There is quite a lot of profanity for a book written in 1921. The book is realistic in its depiction men at war. I gave the book five stars since it does have a strong antiwar focus and deserves a wider readership. The novel could be well used in a classroom setting focused on World War I.

Three Soldiers was the the first book by Dos Passos that I ever read. I had never really read anything about history, especially about war, because none of it ever really sunk in; it just went through one ear and out the other, because it was a subject so foreign, dull, and unapproachable to me. Three Soldiers, though, is written in such a way that the reader cannot help but to comprehend everything going on in the action. The characters are surprisingly real, the speech is authentic, and the imagery and description Dos Passos uses to communicate with the reader are vivid and very effective. By actually paying attention to his 'directions' for imagining a scene, VERY often through the the use of color, I could actually see in my mind just what Dos Passos wanted the reader to see, or so I feel. Now I am a huge fan of this little-known American writer. Three Soldiers turned this history-hating reader into an all-out history buff. He actually teaches the reader while entertaining them, instead of spitting out dry facts that turn people off to history. Three Soldiers is, in my opinion, the ultimate chronicle of soldier-life in WW1.

Memorial Day was spent reading this 1921 novel, in a battered copy from the back shelves of the Los Angeles Public Library's stacks, where the volume had been, the librarian told me, damaged by the sprinklers set off to quench the great fire that destroyed much of the old building over twenty years ago. This fragile book seemed a casualty of its own, like
its characters, who rush off to the French front only to hurry up and wait. Two of them enter the "Oregon forest," the Argonne campaign, but the assault itself takes up only a few harrowing, nightmarish, disconnected scenes halfway through the narrative.

Dos Passos emphasizes the detachment of his characters from their peaceful or uprooted surroundings. Much of the book roams about the mental landscape of its three protagonists, rather than what happens in terms of action. It conveys more the tedium of bureaucracy and the formation of the conformist, against which the sensitive individual chafes. The five chapters have titles that make sure a reader nearly ninety years ago does not forget what, for us, may be unmistakable concepts. "Making the Mould" follows soldiers as they are processed; "The Metal Cools" shows them in France waiting for mobilization; "Machines" takes them closer to the war; "Rust" follows them after peace is declared; "The World Outside" shows them away from the camp; "Under the Wheels" returns them to military control.

Dos Passos, as biographies by Townsend Ludington and Virginia Spencer Carr (both reviewed by me) document, took his own ambivalence against war as one who volunteered as an ambulance driver to witness it into this novel. It's a young writer's effort, ambitious yet a bit awkward, but if you have read his later sprawling chronicles, the relative compression of scope here may demonstrate how Dos Passos sought to integrate modernist perspectives into a standard "boy goes off to fight" storyline. He sought, perhaps as one of the first successful WWI novels in print-- or still in print-- in America, to show a social mechanism grinding away that "Catch-22" or "Full Metal Jacket" or "Dispatches" would do for future conflicts that pitted people against power. In a time when many still remained optimistic about government, idealism, and the impact of culture upon the masses, Dos Passos sought to warn his audience about the degrading effects of patriotic cant, Christian platitudes, and military hypocrisy.

In "Three Soldiers," Dos Passos' first "mature" work, the coming-of-age stories familiar to early 20c readers mingle with a broader assault on conformity. The author listens to speech and it rings sharply. He watches for fog and shade and sun with his trained eye that looked as a painter would what his soldiers witness and struggle to understand. These themes of ordinary people overwhelmed by the world that appears to loom far above the reach of any of us who wander through it deepened to enrich Dos Passos' most successful novels, "Manhattan Transfer" (reviewed by me) and the USA trilogy, with their author's insistent message of resisting any political creed or organizational system that sought to stamp robots out of, or into, wriggling fragile flesh.

We've all seen films or photographs of the lunar landscapes of WWI, but here, in Dos Passos' evocation, we share the shock of the first glimpse of this to a soldier. He may have seen few if any snapshots or film reels of the battleground. Here's his sudden arrival at the demarcation of the actual frontline.

"As they started down the slope, the trees suddenly broke away and they saw the valley between them full of the glare of guns and the white light of star shells. It was like looking into a stove full of glowing embers. The hillside that sloped away from them was full of crashing detonations and yellow tongues of flame. In a battery near the road, that seemed to crush their skulls each time a gun fired, they could see the dark forms of the artillerymen silhouetted in fantastic attitudes against the intermittent red glare. Stunned and blinded, they kept on marching down the road. It seemed to Chrisfield that they were going to step any minute
into the flaring muzzle of a gun."

The rest of the book, after a few vividly sketched battle vignettes, settles down into post-Armistice routine, as John Andrews, the stand-in for Harvard grad Dos Passos, cultivates his aesthetic eye while grousing at the indignities of mass crowd control and his own chapped sensibility. I found him a familiar type, perhaps fresher in Dos Passos' times than ours. Dos Passos pours most of his effort into this soldier's story, after the battle, but it fails to sustain its vigor, although his youthful restlessness and ambition borrowed from their author appear on the page as genuine and honest. The fault's more with the slow pace, unrelieved by excitement. This may portray a side of military life often left out of books, but it's dull.

As "a sort of socialist," Andrews hates "the psychology of slavery," although he must mutter this more than mouth it, for fear of a court-martial. Later in the novel, he and his fellows must face the courage of his convictions. Rumors of uprisings in Paris contend against punishment labor battalions and fates of deserters. From the vantage point of a fresh Soviet revolution, some of his fellow soldiers whisper their hopes for a Communist future; Dos Passos' registers their yearnings but his characteristic caution at any utopia peddled can also be sensed, despite his own radical yearnings at this time.

It's all described well, yet often repetitively. Conversations in one bar after another. Smells of food and rain and sludge. Dappled leaves alternate with mud and grease. Andrews' endemic ennui does drag long sections down after he recovers from a shrapnel wound and heads off to study in Paris. Here's a representative excerpt, as Andrews waits.

"There were other buglers. He wondered how many buglers there were in the army. He could picture them all, in dirty little villages, in stone barracks, in towns, in great camps that served the country for miles with rows of black warehouses and narrow barrack buildings standing with their feet a little apart; giving their little brass bugles a preliminary tap before putting out their cheeks and blowing in them and stealing a million and a half (or was it two million or three million) lives, and throwing the warm sentient bodies into coarse automatons who must be kept busy, lest they grow restive, till killing time began again."

The first up facing the bugle, Fuselli, from San Francisco, begins "Three Soldiers" to complete the trio, two coastal men and the Midwesterner representing a cross-section of America. Fuselli's swerve away from marching off to the front to putting in for an instant transfer to a post well behind the lines confused me. Perhaps Dos Passos meant to convey the inexplicable split-second decision made by a man under pressure, but without any prior preparation for this, Fuselli's ambition to rise in the ranks kept puzzling me, as he'd not shown any aversion to seeking out combat previously. He does show up briefly a couple hundred pages later, after falling out of favor during a battle, but this is left rather vague, via a quick conversation with Andrews, by now on "school detachment" at the Sorbonne.

Unlike Fuselli, but like Andrews, the other soldier enters the novel as a Casual (like Dos Passos himself), suited not for the regular Army. He and Andrews wait to be shipped off; Fuselli has been, but vanishes from much of the novel's middle sections. Chrisfield, a Hoosier farm boy, is jittery and brittle, but due more to his hair-trigger temperament rather than any reveries, as his pal "Andy" is prone to fall into, about a fin-de-siecle Queen of Sheba voluptuary's embrace. These earn prose recalling Stephen Dedalus' contemplations, minus the religion or the guilt. Andrews' vision of the France he finds is filtered through Flaubert. He falls for Jeanne, and stays in Paris to master piano.

"Chris" gets into scraps and he represents one of the common men with whom New York City-raised Andrews learns to deal with, however uneasily. They both wander, together and separately, into cafes, brothels, fields, and cities. Eventually, Chrisfield fades and Andrews continues largely on his own through the rest of the novel. The scenes stay simply composed, but remain attentively rendered in clear prose. It's the author's style, more than the often mundane plot, which keeps you intermittently involved. There's a welcome arrival or threat of military intervention that carries you with a bit more pep through the final chapter.

Dos Passos always faced critics who faulted him with treating his characters more as pieces to be manipulated than rounded figures. I welcome novelists who double as historians, taletellers who tend towards sociology, but those expecting more visceral tension and manufactured bouts may be disappointed by a conflict novel that tends to stay away from the thunder. Dos Passos sides with those who struggle against donning the uniform, who scrabble against the clanking ranks and file clerks. You can see in this early novel that his habitual manner of setting down his stories as social commentary more than psychological exploration remains, nonetheless, his characteristic approach as a writer, take it or leave it.