The Thin Red Line by James Jones

First published: 1962

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1942-1943

Locale: Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands, and the west Pacific Ocean

Principal Characters:

• John Bell, a private, later a sergeant and a first lieutenant, and a member of C-for-Charlie Company
• James Stein, the captain of C-for-Charlie Company, who is removed from command
• George Band, the first lieutenant who replaces Stein and who is also removed
• Edward Welsh, the first sergeant in C-for-Charlie Company
• Doll, a private first class in C-for-Charlie Company
• Fife, a corporal in C-for-Charlie Company
• Witt, a private in Cannon Company
• Queen, a corporal
• Storm, a mess sergeant
• Gordon Tall, a lieutenant colonel and battalion commander
• John Gaff, a captain and Tall’s aide

The Novel

The true protagonist of The Thin Red Line is not a single individual but an entire group, C-for-Charlie Company. No one character provides a point of view that unifies the narrative; instead, a sixty-man group, its fortunes and misfortunes, provides the dominant focus. In keeping with this, James Jones provides a list of all the members of the company at the beginning of the book. Although each is referred to at least once in the course of the novel, some individuals are more important than others, and Jones skillfully follows the action from the points of view of a variety of members of the company. At the novel’s beginning, C-for-Charlie is about to go into combat for the first time. The battle for Guadalcanal was one of the bloodiest campaigns in the entire battle with Japan, and the reader enters this combat sharing the fears and anticipations of the soldiers. By novel’s end, the company has participated in two major engagements of the protracted battle, the Japanese are finally defeated, and the United States Army, and C-for-Charlie with it, prepares to move on to the next island held by the Japanese, New Georgia. At this point, C-for-Charlie is almost entirely different from the company described at the beginning of the novel. There has been great attrition among its members, the commanding captain has changed twice, the lieutenant colonel commanding the battalion has been promoted and transferred, and those who happen to remain in the company—who have not been evacuated or killed—have become almost totally different personalities from what they were when the reader first encountered them.

The novel’s action is subtle. The soldiers in the unit have common interests and concerns, yet because of differences in their personalities, they act in very different ways. In addition, they evolve incrementally as the novel progresses. Many things happen; a large variety of events surrounds the two major battles on the parts of the Guadalcanal mountain referred to as the Dancing Elephant and the Giant Boiled Shrimp. Military historians agree that the battle for Guadalcanal represented a turning point in the Pacific Theater of World War II, and Jones’s description of the turning points in the lives of individual soldiers coincides with a turning point of the war. The drama, however, occurs not on the level of a major event but on that of detail. The reader is as interested as the soldiers in who will win the battle and the war, yet this becomes subordinate to the more immediate concerns of the soldiers: Will I be killed tomorrow? Will I be able to master my fear or not? Do the company commander and battalion commander know what they are doing? How willing are they to risk the lives of American enlisted men for a risky victory and promotion? The Thin Red Line is above all a psychological novel, and a superb one. The title is explained in an epigraph, said to be an old midwestern saying: “There’s only a thin red line between the sane and the mad.” This thin line, mentioned only in the title and epigraph, is present by implication throughout the novel in the exploration of the actions and motives of the members of C-for-Charlie Company. As Jones demonstrates, sanity and madness coexist constantly, from day to day, hour to hour, even minute to minute.

The Characters

Jones is particularly good at describing enlisted men. This virtuosity, prominent in his earlier novel, From Here to Eternity (1951), can be seen throughout The Thin Red Line. In fact, these two books form the first two parts of a trilogy about World War II, despite their publication eleven years apart; the third book in the trilogy, Whistle, was not published until 1978. Jones’s fame as a writer will probably ultimately rest upon these three books—they are his major achievement. Jones knew his recruits very well, and few other writers about World War II can match him in probing their psychology. Jones is also quite good with his officers, although he tends to view them from the enlisted man’s point of view. Captain Stein, Captain Gaff, and Lieutenant Colonel Tall are complex characters, their motivations subtly, probingly investigated. It is natural to compare Jones’s novel to Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948): Mailer’s fictitious Pacific island, Anopopei, and Jones’s Guadalcanal closely resemble each other, Mailer’s Colonel Cummings and Jones’s Tall perform very similar functions, and the two authors share an animus against the battalion commanders. Although Tall lacks the paraphernalia of a “Time Machine” to fill in his background, he is just as sharply drawn, vivid, and complex as Cummings. The portrait of Captain Stein is fuller still, and one of the most sensitive depictions of a company commander in World War II literature.

Jones’s recruits, as noted above, are drawn with even more exactness and a surer knowledge or experience. Most of the members of C-for-Charlie Company are recruits. The realism of these portraits is open to no doubt—the pertinent question to ask, instead, is, How interesting are they? Though lifelike and vivid, do they have the articulated drama of personality that a reader expects in great literature? These enlisted men are shown with their fears, banalities, irrational impulses, and vulgarities intact, sometimes without traditional literary heightening. A few readers would be willing to forego certain realistic touches in the book, for example, those dealing with masturbation, excretory functions, cruelty, possibly cowardice. There are literary critics who are repelled by some of Jones’s characters, preferring World War II recruits like those in Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead: picturesque, exaggerated, and seen through the sociological prism of American regional folklore. Jones’s recruits depend less on an analysis of sociological background and more on purely individual, observed personality traits. These recruits are complex, probably more so than Mailer’s, and certainly the probing of their relationships and motives, as well as their gradual evolution in the course of the novel, are remarkably thorough and nuanced, close psychological observation taking the place of sociological schemata. Is the reader interested in the kind of characters described by Jones in the first place? Perhaps they are realistically portrayed, but are they interesting—would the reader care to meet Fife or Doll or Storm in real life? Perhaps not, but by no means is The Thin Red Line a book that appeals to the reader’s sense of fantasy, his desire for fictionalized flat characters, for cliches or slogans. Sometimes the reader wonders if the book is fiction at all—it seems so close to observed life. One of the foremost contemporary military historians, John Keegan of Sandhurst, has singled out The Thin Red Line as a book of remarkable depth and one of the few American or British novels of World War II able to stand comparison with the best written about World War I. It is a book of astonishing insight—above all in its characterization.

A major paradox of the novel is that while the probing of psychological motivation and relationships is of great sophistication, Jones’s style is often clumsy, and he seems closer in psychological outlook to ordinary or lower-class characters than to those who are educated, literary, or middle class. Jones was relatively uninfluenced by literary modernism, and he is certainly no Marcel Proust—at least not in his style. Yet he has much of Proust’s psychological perspicacity. This is the paradox of Jones that explains, at least in part, why some critics think The Thin Red Line is one of the best American novels—possibly the best—about World War II, while others neglect to mention it at all. On one point, almost all critics are agreed: Jones’s characterization is sensitive, complex, and often superb.

Critical Context

James Jones was lucky—his first novel, From Here to Eternity, was an enormous success, it was made into a film in 1953, and thereafter he was able to devote himself to writing. Critics largely agree that his war trilogy stands above all of his other books. When Ernest Hemingway read From Here to Eternity, he thought that Jones’s talent was possibly greater than his own. The question now is just how high these war novels rank: Are they among the half dozen best American novels about World War II, or further down the list? Is The Thin Red Line as good as or even better than The Naked and the Dead, a famous but fatally flawed novel whose final third is an artistic disaster? Critics who admire the modernists, above all T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in poetry, James Joyce in fiction, are hard on Jones. Frequently, his style is awkward—it is not literary or “high,” and he often uses words that college graduates do not admit into their lexicons. Those critics, however, who are not advocates of Anglo-American modernism, tend to rate Jones much higher. This plain stylist, who is certainly not a philosophical novelist, treats almost every theme that can be found in Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and other war novels—the motivation of the soldier and the officer, the nature of fear and bravery, of leadership, free will, and authority in the varied situations of war—with more depth and with more probing, psychological breadth of understanding than anyone else.

Bibliography

Aldrich, Nelson W., ed. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. 3d ser. New York: Viking Press, 1967. Jones talks about his methods of composition and defends his novels and his own brand of realistic writing against critical attacks. He also believes that an academic education can hurt a writer. Although he was living in Europe at the time of the interview, he considers himself to be an American.

Carter, Steven R. James Jones: An American Literary Orientalist Master. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. A deeply probing study of Jones’s spiritual evolution and philosophy and his concern with individual salvation and growth. Includes bibliography.

Giles, James R. James Jones. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Examines each of Jones’s novels in detail and gives a brief biography of the novelist. Sees a central division between the he-man and the sophisticate in Jones’s life and art. Contains an excellent bibliography.

Hassan, Ihab. Radical Innocence. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961. Describes the hero of From Here to Eternity, Pruitt, as a passive sufferer and compares his alienation to that of the Negro. Hassan likes the novel but not the subliterary psychology in which Jones indulges.

Jones, Peter G. War and the Novelist. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976. Praises James Jones’s From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line highly, describing them as accurate portrayals of Army life and combat and as possessing psychological insights.

Morris, Willie. James Jones: A Friendship. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. The friendship between these two writers occurred late in Jones’s life. They both lived on Long Island and were drawn into conversations about life and art. Jones reveals much about his early military career.