The Thin Red Line
by James Jones

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Book Reviews of The Thin Red Line

Book Review: "It were better that war is so terrible...
Summary: 4 Stars

This is the best novelistic treatment of warfare in the Pacific Theater in World War II. Jones manages to skip the familiar cliches about how tragic it is that children must die in these wars or that their ultimate sacrifice has helped save a grateful nation.

The truth is that there are no children in foxholes. And the United States, to its terrible shame, has yet to show even a modicum of gratitude to its World War II vets by building an appropriate monument to them on the Mall in Washington, D.C.

One reader complains that Jones throws so many characters into the narrative that you need a scorecard to keep them all straight. While this may be confusing for the reader, it represents exactly the confusion that men in units like C-for-Charlie Company experienced every day as men were killed and wounded around them and strangers came to take their place. These strangers will only become known to the surviving members of C-for-Charlie Company as they suffer with the old timers.

Jones is doing so much with this book -- consciously echoing the martial tragedy of the Iliad, crafting a realistic account of modern combat and asking questions about how men resolve the terrors of combat and what that numbing experience does to their sense of self, their sense of humanity. He also uses a Joycean amalgam of puns, phrases run together and other techniques to get at the individual psychological reality underlying each character's reaction to events in the external world.

This is a fantastic novel for any age. Younger readers who are not familiar with the Guadalcanal campaign might want to learn a little bit about that campaign and, in particular, the geography of the island itself (although Jones notes that places like the Dancing Elephant are fictional in nature).

Teachers using this novel might want to also supplement it with Terrence Malick's film version of the book. I loved the movie, but thought it was a strange sort of war movie. In retrospect, having now read "Thin Red Line," I can see that Malick did an outstanding job of hewing to the spirit of Jones' work.

Classics Books

• Books > Subjects > Literature & Fiction
• Genre Fiction > War