Three Soldiers

John Dos Passos was the son of a Chicago attorney. He was born in 1894 living until 1970. He is most famous for his "USA Trilogy" and "Manhatten Transfer." The work under review is "Three Soldiers" set in the waning months and early years following World War I. It concerns: 1. Dan Fusseli a poor uneducated Italian-American from San Francisco who dreams of becoming a corporal, winning the hand of the girl back home and fighting the Germans. He realizes none of these modest goals. 2. Chris Chrisfield is a farmer from rural Indiana who murders a mean sergeant named Anderson. He deserts the American army following the war while stationed in Paris. He often dreams he is back home again in Indiana. 3. John Andrews like author Dos Passos is a Harvard graduate. He is a musician who is bored by the deadly mindless tedium of the army. He also deserts the army, meets a sophisticated Parisian woman and falls in love with a French barmaid. He is captured on the last page of the novel facing at least 20 years in Leavenworth for desertion. It is manifest that Dos Passos has used the three main characters to represent the different geographical regions of the United States. The characters differ in their educational levels. All three musketeers become very disillusioned with America, the US Army and the government. These characters mirror Dos Passos's hatred of war which he developed while serving a brief time in France during the war. At this time he was also infatuated with communism and the radical left wing of the political spectrum. The book reminds me of TS Eliot's "Wasteland" poem put into no-nonesense prose by the Harvard Midwestern author. There is little plot development in the novel. Anyone expecting to read of World War I combat will be disappointed since no battle scenes are given. The regiment in the story does not get a chance to participate in the gory battles of that horrendous war. Dos Passos is good at vivid descriptions and the inner feelings of his characters. We sense the boredom, fatigue and war weariness of the men involved. There is quite a lot of profanity for a book written in 1921. The book is realistic in its depiction men at war. I gave the book five stars since it does have a strong antiwar focus and deserves a wider readership. The novel could be well used in a classroom setting focused on World War I.

John Dos Passos was one of the few to tackle all these themes in one work, the gigantic USA. In Three Soldiers, an early novel set during the war before Weimar, he draws on personal experience to capture the clackety-clack of the war-machine. As in his masterwork, he uses popular song and bittersweet evocations of innocent youth in the face of ruthless power to trace the breaking of young men's dreams. With his elaborate narrative structures and seemingly effortless prose he shows that it is not just war that requires the suppression of liberty but modern industrial society too. But unlike the greatest first world war novel Journey To The End Of The Night there are signposts here of socialist paths that led far away from dystopia.

The story is so so to good, but the images at work make the book a charm of life. I look forward to reading all of his works. Its the life that flows from every sentence that is hard to turn down.

I probably shouldn't have read this after the great and mighty USA trilogy since anything else he did only pales to that great work but this is a fine, if little known work from a great writer. As people who have read the USA trilogy know, Dos Passos absolutely hated WWI and everything it stood for and here he got to take out his anger on a few targets. While not as focused as 1919 was, he shows his feelings with a deft touch and a depth of feeling that was rarely seen in war novels, his characters aren't all brilliant, the only really three dimensional one is Andrews but they depict a cross section of American life and through their adventures he shows what his firm belief was: that the machine of the army sucked the spirit out of someone and turned them nearly into a automaton. And without focused on the gory battles, he shows the horror of the war in a way that few writers have. Definitely a book that needs to be looked at again and should be ranked with The Naked and the Dead, and Red Badge of Courage (among others).

Three Soldiers was the the first book by Dos Passos that I ever read. I had never really read anything about history, especially about war, because none of it ever really sunk in; it just went through one ear and out the other, because it was a subject so foreign, dull, and unapproachable to me. Three Soldiers, though, is written in such a way that the reader cannot help but to comprehend everything going on in the action. The characters are surprisingly real, the speech is authentic, and the imagery and description Dos Passos uses to communicate with the reader are vivid and very effective. By actually paying attention to his 'directions' for imagining a scene, VERY often through the the use of color, I could actually see in my mind just what Dos Passos wanted the reader to see, or so I feel. Now I am a huge fan of this little-known American writer. Three Soldiers turned this history-hating reader into an all-out history buff. He actually teaches the reader while entertaining them, instead of spitting out dry facts that turn people off to history. Three Soldiers is, in my opinion, the ultimate chronicle of soldier-life in WW1.