s life. He wants to be a thirty-year-man because the raw violence, the drunken sprees, the sex without responsibility, the demands on physical endurance and technical skill express and challenge his maleness. Prewitt s war with the army is touched off by a breach of the freedom he expects in return for his loyalty-and service as a soldier.had the bad luck to fall ill and was sent to the hospital for the treatment. When he returned to the outfit after two month absence he had lost his position. His pride was hurt when an inferior Bugler was promoted above him. Prewitt asked to be transferred to another outfit. After he refused pointblank to ever take part in a fight, he was sent to the kitchen, where his work was hard and humiliating, though he never complained. In a skirmish with a drunken sergeant, his senior, who wanted to stab Prewitt with a knife, he took him on, and the Tribunal sent him to the Stockade. In keeping with his life philosophy Prewitt did not mention the knife at the trial, which would have saved him from imprisonment. After three months in the Stockade Prew came out but didn't return to the barracks; he became a deserter. He missed his comrades, he felt homesick for his outfit. After the Pearl Harbour air raid of the Japanese planes his decision to return to the regiment was made. He wanted to steal to the barracks under cover of night. A patrol car traced his movements and taking him for a spy shot him at a short distance from his regiment. Prewitt s history is an eloquent paean to a concept of individualism rapidly becoming anachronistic in an increasingly bureaucratic society. Milt Warden, the co-protagonist of the novel, embodies in his personality the masculine world of the enlisted man. He equates his integrity with the existence of the enlisted man, and when he falls in love with the company commander s wife, Karen, and finally refuses the commission which would make her permanently available to him, he preserves his integrity and his individualism. He does not sell out to the bureaucracy or to women. At the end of the novel, Prew is dead, but Warden drinks and brawls on the way to Mrs.Kipfer s brothel as the Lurline sails from Hawaii with Karen aboard.other work, Some Came Running (1957), a long panoramic novel about a soldier, who came home from the war, is set in a Midwestern town at the time between World War II and the Korean War. It s also the story of love, the theme which Jones was unable to handle. The love affair in Some Came Running between the writer Dave and the teacher Gwen borders on the ludicrous. A college professor of English, Gwen has developed a naive thesis about the relation of frustration in love and artistic creativity. When Dave, one of the writers about whom she has been theorizing, returns to his small midwestern hometown, Gwen immediately falls in love with him. Dave, who hates the town, has returned for a visit only to embarrass his brother. But after one meeting with Gwen, who has an undeserved reputation as a woman of the world, Dave decides to settle in the town until he succeeds in seducing her. After a visitor two, he is passionately in love with Gwen. The couple never do get together because the thirty-eight-year-old Ph.D. in literature would prefer to lose the man she loves rather than admit to him that she is still a virgin! The forty-year-old Dave, who has had plenty of experience with women, decides that Gwen will not sleep with him because she is a nymphomaniac! The interminable philosophical digressions on life and love that inflate the novel are equally sophomoric. James Jones fictional terrain is limited to that peculiar all-male world governed by strictly masculine interests, attitudes, and values. Into this world, no female can step without immediately altering its character. The female must remain on the periphery of male life - a powerful force in male consciousness, but solely as a provocative target for that intense sexual need that has nothing to do with procreation or marriage.Pistol (1959) is the story of an Army private who accidentally gets a pistol that comes to be his symbol of safety in war. The Thin Red Line (1962) is another war novel dealing with the life of a U. S. infantry company on Guadalcanal in 1942-1943 but its attitudes and theme belong to the 1960s. The title itself is a reflection of the main theme; it symbolizes the uncertainty of the borderline between sanity and insanity, between man and beast, life and death.battle, the company, made up of platoons which are made up of squads, is deployed by the battalion commander according to a pre-established plan of attack. The battalions in the regiment are deployed by the regimental commander. The regiments are deployed by the division commander; the divisions deployed b...
