James Jones's Codes of Conduct

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones 5-1-2012 James Jones's Codes of Conduct Matthew Samuel Ross University of Nevada, Las Vegas Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/thesesdissertations Part of the American Literature Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Repository Citation Ross, Matthew Samuel, "James Jones's Codes of Conduct" (2012). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 1617. http://dx.doi.org/10.34917/4332598 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by Digital Scholarship@UNLV with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. 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JAMES JONES’S CODES OF CONDUCT By Matthew Samuel Ross Bachelor of Arts in English University of California Los Angeles 2006 Master of Arts in English University of Nevada Las Vegas 2010 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English College of Liberal Arts The Graduate College University of Nevada, Las Vegas May 2012 Copyright by Matthew Ross, 2012 All Rights Reserved THE GRADUATE COLLEGE We recommend the dissertation prepared under our supervision by Matthew Samuel Ross entitled James Jones’s Codes of Conduct be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English John Irsfeld, Committee Chair John Unrue, Committee Member Joseph McCullough, Committee Member Joseph Fry, Graduate College Representative Ronald Smith, Ph. D., Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate College May 2012 ii ABSTRACT JAMES JONES’S CODES OF CONDUCT Though his work was celebrated by his contemporaries and remains highly lauded by scholars of war fiction, James Jones’s novels are already at risk of falling outside the mainstream canon of 20th Century American literature. My dissertation project proposes an intensive examination of James Jones’s three volume war trilogy, From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, and Whistle, collectively considered by eminent critic Paul Fussell to be the finest work to emerge from the Second World War. Jones’s trilogy is a mainstay within the overall genre of war fiction, yet it has been afforded relatively little critical attention by mainstream critics. Scholarship on Jones’s work has heretofore focused on his general body of work with one critical examination of the Eastern philosophical influences on his early work. While critics have examined individual works within the trilogy as stand-alone works, no extensive scholarly study has been done on the trilogy as a whole. Jones initially intended From Here to Eternity to cover the entire scope of the trilogy’s time period, but later split them into three related works. From Here to Eternity covers Army life pre-Pearl Harbor, The Thin Red Line follows the same character archetypes into combat, and Whistle describes the post-Guadalcanal return of the first war wounded to hospitals in the states. The particular focus of my dissertation will be on deciphering the unwritten codes that govern the behavior of Jones’s characters in addition to the written A.R.s (Army Regulations) and how they change through the three phases of combat covered over the course of the trilogy (pre-combat, combat, and post-combat). At each stage of combat, the behavior of Jones’s characters is guided by a variety of unofficial codes that govern appropriate and inappropriate behavior with iii regards to conduct in the Army and between the sexes. My goal is to prove that examining these unwritten ‘codes of conduct’ will contribute greatly towards understanding Jones’s construction of masculine behavior and determining the makeup of what traits constitute an archetypical Jonesian Protagonist. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As Prewitt could never have endured “The Treatment” without soldiers like Maggio, Stark, Warden and Malloy around to bolster his spirits, I could never have completed this project without the aid, encouragement, and support of my examining committee. To Dr. Joseph McCullough, Dr. John Unrue, Dr. Joseph Fry, and especially Dr. John Irsfeld, I offer my most sincere and profuse thanks. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract..............................................................................................................................iii Acknowledgements..............................................................................................................v Table of Contents................................................................................................................vi Introduction........................................................................................................................1 Chapter I: Biography........................................................................................................9 Chapter II: From Here to Eternity................................................................................38 Jones’s Hierarchy of Excellence .......................................................................................46 The Personal Code.............................................................................................................66 The Exception....................................................................................................................82 The Insider’s View.............................................................................................................97 Chapter III: The Thin Red Line...................................................................................104 Utilitarianism and Combat...............................................................................................119 Fear and Embarrassment in Combat................................................................................148 Attitudes Towards Wounds and ‘Doing Enough’............................................................162 The End of the Old Army................................................................................................174 Chapter IV: Whistle......................................................................................................177 Displaced Persons............................................................................................................186 “An Untenable Position”..................................................................................................203 Conclusion......................................................................................................................235 Bibliography...................................................................................................................238 Curriculum Vitae...........................................................................................................243 vi INTRODUCTION It is a peculiar shame that in the academic community authors whose work deals primarily with war are all-too-often marginalized by critics—or worse, forgotten entirely. Even though he was widely read when he died in 1977, and highly respected by contemporaries like William Styron, Willie Morris, Norman Mailer, and Kurt Vonnegut, James Jones’s work received almost no serious critical study during his lifetime and relatively little in the decades since. Writing fifteen years after Jones’s death, Michael Lydon described how Jones’s work had “drifted into a ‘jury’s out’ limbo, and bringing in a favorable verdict today means bucking current critical trends. Not only is he a traditional realist in the postmodern era, he is also a White Male Author if ever there was one” (“A Voice against Anonymous Death” 120). Jones’s work has been criticized as being vulgar, crude and simplistic. His early experiments in creating a literary style that he thought would more naturally mimic vernacular speech through techniques such as the omission of apostrophes from contractions earned a chorus of sneered admonition that he needed to learn the rules of grammar; the general assumption was not that he had made a deliberate choice to break standard punctuation and/or grammatical rules but that he had simply never learned the rules in the first place. The critical attacks grew so savage that Jones, the winner of the 1952 National Book Award, felt compelled to write his third novel The Pistol in a way that would prove to critics that he knew how to use conventional grammar and punctuation. But what Jones’s numerous critics failed to appreciate were the many fine qualities Jones brought to his work. As Jones scholar Steven Carter observes, the 1 contention that Jones’s writing style is too vulgar or unsophisticated to deserve serious study: is itself simplistic [and] downplays the complexity of his philosophy…the accusation glaringly fails to note how often the rough surface of his fiction delineated subtle and original psychological insights; how the ‘clumsy’ repetitious style was

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