Indeed, the implied argument is often more important than the
story, when there is a story. And the argument consists chiefly of
"_this_ happened to me," "I saw _this_ and did not like it," "I was
driven to _this_ or _that_," until the mass of circumstantial incident
and sensation reminds one of the works of Zola and the scientific
naturalists who half a century ago tried to put society as an organism
into fiction and art.
No better example has been given us than Dos Passos's "Three
Soldiers," a book that would be tiresome (and is tiresome to many)
in its night after night and day after day crammed with every
possible unpleasant sensation and experience that three young men
could have had in the A. E. F. And that the experiences recorded
were unpleasant ones, forced upon youth, not chosen by its will,
is thoroughly characteristic. If it had not been for the
rebellious pacifism in this book, it is questionable whether
readers who had not been in France, and so could not relish the
vivid reality of the descriptions, would have read to the end of
the story.
The cause of all this is interesting, more interesting than some
of the results.
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