John Dos Passos is a great novelist, one of the great American novelists of the early 20th century. But this is not a great novel. It lacks a dramatic structure that can keep the reader going and the dialogue is weak. Though it is about "Three Soldiers" it almost reads like three short stores and there is very little about battle. Still, it is an authentic novel of the post World War 1 generation and the issues that he addresses -- loneliness, emptiness, conflicted patriotism, despair -- are deeply felt. Dos Passos wants the world to know what a dehumanizing institution that military was and how it killed more than those lost in combat. But this is such a focus of the book that the story loses nuance.
What I love about the book are the physical descriptions of Paris and the French countryside. You can see the talent emerging in this early work and the passions at work in the "lost generation." That emotion, that honestly, is what makes it an interesting read.

I stopped reading it because all the dialogue is written dialectically and that is SO distracting to me - just didn't want to struggle with it! I know it's a classic but I'm getting too old to wrestle with a book!

wars a bit hard to get through but the second half is really good and worth the effort to get there! favourite quotes: "everybody talks sense until they've had tea... it's only after tea that anyone is ever amusing", could have been from an Oscar Wilde play, especially since the character goes on to talk about Sarah Bernhardt's fondness of curtains: They give an air of drama to existence... there is nothing more heroic than curtains"

Author John Dos Passos came out of World War I believing that socialism and pacifism offered the world a better way forward. He finished writing Three Soldiers in the spring of 1919, but the novel was not published until 1921. Interestingly, the 1932 Modern Library edition of the novel that I read includes an introduction dated June 1932 in which Dos Passos laments the fact that he did not “work over” the novel much more than he did before it was first published in 1921. It is obvious from the introduction that the author was a disillusioned man in 1932 but that he had not given up on changing the politics of the average American. According to him:

“…we can at least meet events with our minds cleared of some of the romantic garbage that kept us from doing clear work then. Those of us who have lived through have seen these years strip the bunting off the great illusions of our time, we must deal with the raw structure of history now, we must deal with it quick, before it stamps us out.”

Three Soldiers follows a pattern familiar to anyone who has read even a few war novels, be those stories about WWI, WWII, or the wars in Viet Nam, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq. We first meet the main characters as civilians and then follow them through their military basic training, their deployment to the field, into battle, and finally, to the aftermath of their combat experiences. While Dos Passos did take this approach in Three Soldiers, there are strikingly few pages dedicated to actual battle descriptions and the like. Instead, the author focuses more on what happens to soldiers when combat ends by showing his main characters as they recuperate from their wounds in war zone hospitals. In that way, it is easy for Dos Passos to contrast the disillusioned, sometimes physically and emotionally crippled, soldiers there to the patriotic, ambitious boys they were when they eagerly joined the army to serve their country.

This is not an easy novel to read, mainly because each new chapter seems to open with long, dreary descriptions of the cold, wet days that the soldiers wake up to every morning. Those descriptions help set the tone for the mental state of the author’s three soldiers (although the bulk of the novel is really about only one of them) as they finally figure out how naïve they have been about how the system really works. Rather than winning promotions and pay increases, they find themselves doing menial tasks and reporting to men who simply gamed the military system better than them. They get bored – and the reader starts getting bored with and for them. Perhaps that is what Dos Passos was aiming for; if so it works beautifully.

Bottom Line: Even to its last two pages, Three Soldiers is one of the most depressing war novels I’ve ever read. The argument that Dos Passos makes for socialism and pacificism is clear enough, but because the author sees everything in such black and white terms, he does not, in the long run, build a very effective case for either.

Bonus Observation: This Dos Passos quote from the 1932 introduction could have easily been written last week:

“Certainly eighty percent of the inhabitants of the United States must read a column of print a day, if it’s only in the tabloids and the Sears Roebuck catalogue. Somehow, just as machinemade shoes aren’t as good as handmade shoes, the enormous quantity produced has resulted in diminished power in books. We’re not men enough to run the machines we’ve made.”

I can only imagine what Dos Passos would think if he were alive today when all of us have hundreds, if not thousands, of books at our electronic fingertips twenty-four hours a day?

Dos Passos's novel of American soldiers serving in the "Great War" eschews depictions of combat, but delivers an indictment of the bereaucracy, paternalism and jingoistism of military culture. The story of John Andrews is the main thread of the "Three Soldeirs," but his experience is given context and depth alongside the diverging paths of his early companions, Dan Fuselli and Chris Chrisfield. That Andrews was a musician before the war is key, emphasizing the aspects of human militarization that strip the tender and sympathetic aspects of man's nature in favor of his raw physical abilities. With Andrews, we feel not only the loss of creative and expressive freedom, but of the self. Dos Passos' command of language is masterful, moderating conversations between voices of various linguistic, regional and cultural constructions, deftly capturing the various ways people talk and gesture.

I had high hopes for "Three Soldiers", but I was mildly disappointed by it. This novel was written by John Dos Passos based on his own experience as a soldier in the First World War. It is the story of three soldiers in France during and immediately after the war who struggle with being soldiers in France. One of the soldiers serves relatively honorably in the trenches, one of them becomes a student at the Sorbonne on a soldiers' scholarship program, and one of the soldiers goes off the deep end and goes AWOL at a time when deserters could still be shot by their officers.

Overall I thought that "3 Soldiers" was a bit whiny. Granted that it's hard to judge the soldiers of the First World War who faced butchery in the trenches on a scale that has not been experienced before or since. But these soldiers had it relatively easy compared to soldiers in other World War I novels, especially "All Quiet on the Western Front". One of the soldiers got a free college education in a French university, with the only caveat that he continue wearing the uniform and check in with his American military officers. But he whined about this. Really? It seemed that the liberties granted to these soldiers only whetted their appetites for mischief. The end of the novel, where the one soldier ditched his uniform and went on the lam as an American in a France that was still largely occupied by the allies leaves the reader wondering what was he thinking? I suppose like most things about war, there really is not a happy ending here. Still, this is a particularly confusing and depressing novel.

Still, this novel may be interesting for readers who are interested in the experience of common soldiers in the First World War.

John Dos Passos is an author whom I had never read before but I am most assuredly happy to have found his works. "Three Soldiers" is an exceptionally well written book which gives the reader a fabulous look inside the emotional side of being a soldier during WWI. I hate spoilers so all I will say is that it is well worth your reading!

I feel bad about abandoning this classic on Memorial Day, but I feel like I've given the novel a good try after 4 (of 13) discs - certainly enough to appreciate how frustrated men can be when they are fired up to fight but are forced to wait. Perhaps I will pick up this book again for a reading challenge but for now, neither the prose nor characters are interesting enough to make me stay until the end.

Read: 27-30 May 2016

I had to read some Dos Passos in college but went back to this one after 10000 years. I forgot how he painted a picture so well. This was one of the first - if not the first - war novel written from the soldiers POV, without the glorification of those who stand on the side-lines.

In Three Soldiers, John Dos Passos presents a raw depiction of the American experience in the First World War, devoid of any idealism whatever. This novel is presented in six parts, with titles such as "Making the Mould" (Part One), "Machines" (Part Three), and "Rust" (Part Four). The theme of a soldier being treated like a machine resonates throughout the novel, and we sense the futility of trying to push against the mechanistic power of the military. The narrative relates the experiences of three soldiers, Andrews, Chrisfield, and Fuselli -- yet Andrews's story supplies the bulk of the narration toward the end. Dos Passos's strength lies in his ability to fuse well-honed description with his characters' thoughts, particularly those of Andrews as he struggles between his desire to be a musician and the power of the military to command his every move. Dos Passos captures the world of the Great War with a clarity of vision, and his tale joins its place on the shelves among the many poems and stories of First World War disillusionment. In some ways, his skeptism toward the military are similar to those expressed by Louis-Ferdinand Celine in Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (Journey to the End of Night), another novel with events from the First World War. It is also interesting to compare Three Soldiers to Hemingway's more famous Farewell to Arms; where Hemingway is spare and ambiguous both in prose and dialogue, Dos Passos is more direct and paints with a broader stroke. While in this work, Dos Passos may not have achieved the refined and sparse prose of Ernest Hemingway, he has created a compellingly realistic tale that captures the emotional weight of moments with devastating accuracy and power. In that way, Three Soldiers may be of one of the most underrated works about The First World War.

3.5 stars. Dos Passos' Three Soldiers was the first great American novel of the Great War, but it isn't actually about the war itself. There are no long descriptions of trench warfare or battles. Instead, it's about the men who stumble into the war -- searching for escape, or for direction, or for a career, or for adventure, or for an Ideal -- only to discover they had been sold a bill of goods. Instead of making the world safe for Democracy, they found themselves "slaves" in a mechanized system that trapped them, subjugated them, stole their youth (and their lives), and left them without direction or purpose. Despite the title, the novel focuses mainly on one solider, Andrews, a Harvard-educated musician who is obviously very much based on Dos Passos himself. We see him transform from idealistic young man to directionless deserter, disillusioned and lost as the war ends and he is still trapped in the "Army of Occupation," slaving for the financial interests of the country that has forgotten him and the men like him who never wanted to be long-term soldiers.

The novel has a stark ending, and it must have been powerful for readers in 1921 (especially veterans), as Dos Passos has soldiers expressing ideas that would have been considered treasonous and would have shocked those on the homefront who bought into idea of all-American doughboys fighting jauntily for Democracy and Freedom. I will admit that the novel has lost some of its bite in the intervening century, as Americans have gone through the Vietnam conflict, which brought all these realities into the open and changed how America views itself (and its military obsession) in a way that makes Dos Passos' novel seem a little tame in comparison. But we shouldn't fault Dos Passos for that. If anything, he looks ahead to a century in which America comes to realize that its reality doesn't match its rhetoric, and that our politicians continually misrepresent war to a population who buy into the propaganda, only to cut adrift those soldiers who do the dirty work.

Dos Passos' novel remains a touchstone for understanding Lost Generation pathos in the century where the United States would see both a meteoric rise in its military might and a searing self-reflection on the painful truths about its wartime atrocities on the road to becoming a superpower.

I read this right before I read Three Comrades. I probably would have felt better about this one if I hadn't read Three Comrades but the comparison of two such similar books was too much and Three Soldiers seemed more disappointing the further I got into Three Comrades. That is too bad because the story is an interesting twist on what I expected. I thought it was about the war (WWI) but it was mostly about the Army. The majority of the book took place with soldiers waiting to get to the war or waiting to get home afterward. The main problem was that the characters were so wooden I didn't really end up caring much about them. If you're interested in the WWI era it's worth reading though.