y the army commander, and the armies deployed all over the globe by a staff in Washington, DC Within this hierarchy, which gets larger and larger as it moves up the chain and farther and farther from the battle lines, the fighting soldier is a grain of sand on a beach encircling the globe. When the men see wounded and dead for the first time they are shocked and horrified. During their first battle, they react intensely to the suffering and death of their comrades. But as the fighting continues, the dead bodies of their fellow-soldiers no longer really bother them, and they lose all compunction about killing enemy soldiers. The starving Japanese prisoners are treated inhumanly, but only because the combat situation has revealed to their captors the insignificance of the individual human life except to the being who possesses it. Jones vision of human existence is brutal and unsentimental, and he conveys it with superb artistry. His story of battle is fast-paced, tightly structured, painfully realistic. James Jones s fictional terrain is limited, but within that limited area he has presented a frightening twentieth-century view of individual man s insignificance in society and in the universe. Just Call. His novel Just Call is the reflection of life of the lost generation. The four central characters Strange, Landers, Winch and Prell are recovering in the hospital from physical and psychological damage the war inflicted on them. The burden of their hard experience tells upon their fate. Prell dies in the quarrel, Winch finishes his life by suicide in the psychiatric department of the hospital, Landers leaves the hospital and is run over by the car ten steps away from the hospital. Strange, after recovering, goes back to war in Europe. But the prospect of future life horrifies him. He comes to the railings on the deck of the ship, intentionally leans over, and falls into the cold pit of ocean blackness. His other novels are Go to the Widow-Maker (1967), The Marry Month of May (1971), A Touch of Danger (1973), and Whistle (1978). Jones published an acclaimed short-story collection, The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories (1968), a nonfictional history of World War II from the viewpoint of the soldier, World War II (1975), and a book of essays, Viet Journal (1975). Jones also published short fiction and articles throughout his adult life.
Flannery O Connor
1925-1964O Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925 and was raised and spent her short life almost entirely in nearby Milledgeville, where her family had lived since before the Civil War. Although she limited herself to a rural, southern literary terrain and the body of her work was small, her place in twentieth-century American literature is secure.wrote steadily from 1948 until her death in 1964. For fourteen of those sixteen years she was plagued by lupus, a painful, wasting disease that she had inherited from her father and that kept her ever more confined and immobile. I have never been anywhere but sick , she wrote. In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it s always a place where there s no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's great mercies. was educated at the Georgia State College for Women from which she graduated in 1945. She then went off to the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. After receiving her M.F.A. there in 1947, O Connor returned to Milledgeville to live with her widowed mother. Her first novel, Wise Blood, published in 1952 when she was 27, centers on a fanatical preacher of the Church of God without Christ , who insists that the blind don t see, the lame don t walk, and what s dead stays that way , but who nevertheless is consumed by a passion to imitate His sufferings. She followed that novel with a short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), a second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), which concerns a backwoods prophet and his atheist nephew locked in struggle for the prophet s grandson. Another collection of stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, was published posthumously in 1965. The Complete Stories (1971) won her a posthumous National...
