James Jones's Codes of Conduct

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 20 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