This is my favorite book on war I have ever read, which says a lot since I hate war and I generally don't like books on it. Hemingway, eat your heart out!

I am a victim of my own arrogance and a state college education. I read the reviews of the literate and mumble to myself in frustrated envy. I swear I'll do better, but I'm too impulsive and passionate to restrain my energy into coherence. Even when I think I've been clear, time and a reread prove I've babbled and left out a key word or failed to include a whole knot of related thoughts.

I went to Three Soldiers thinking I might find a book akin to Oil. I loved the rattling of the ogliarchy's cage and the rage at the complicity of the government. TS is only in passing about those issues. It's about the Army. I didn't care for my time in, but I had a better idea what life would be like. I found though you can have a perfect idealization of an experience and not appreciate how different living it will be.

Dos Passos takes three young men from different parts of the country and three different socio economic levels (actually educational) and put them through three different WWI experiences. None prosper.

Dos Passos speaks unendingly about being ordered about and being made to do stupid, pointless, degrading work. I found the most frustrating and depressing part was the loss of personal freedom; not being able to go where and when I wanted, dress as I liked and being restrained in my criticism of these facts of life.

In Dos Passos France it rains unendingly. So that's mood and a metaphore, I get it, but it keeps raining.

WWI ends and we follow Andrews as he tries to write a musical score that expresses his feelings. He has two love affairs, he dumps one and chases his imorta only to be dumped by her. He is given a bum deal by the Army, makes it much worse, and gets caught in the end to an uncertain future.

I found it an easy, coherent read. Dos Passos uses some nice little literary devices that have become common tools. No surprises and not terribly engaging.

John Dos Passos

This is for your reading soul--feel the music in the words. One cannot help but be moved by the main character John who feels so deeply and whose emotions are right at the surface. Set during the American participation in World War One, Dos Passos captures the "unromantic" reality of warfare and friendship and the helplessness of it all. All that is left of him is to take a small stand against the machinery and the endless orders by deserting the army and composing a symphony about John Brown's body.

Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers was his second work, released when he was but 25 years of age. A view of World War I as seen through the experiences of three different Americans, the narrative presents the bleakness of war… the mechanization of men and materials to grind out a result, and the effect on the human spirit. Dos Passos is depressing at times, his characters filled with disaffection. Published in 1921 this work was undoubtedly a major event, but it lost some of its influence with the passing of time; Dos Passos’ greatest works were still on the horizon and one can see hints of the developing master.

I was drawn to Three Soldiers after hearing an old time radio show that brings literature to the airways & wanting to know the whole book as John Dos Passos intended. I have always enjoyed a good war story either written or on film when the human element is brought to light & in this novel I was not disappointed. This not a book just about the world war 1, but it is about the American experience in that war seen through a man that was young American, that volunteered his services before America's involvement & also after American intervention. I love books written by people that lived during those times and write their thoughts about it. It was apparent before googling the author that he had socialist leanings and was not too found of America by what he wrote as a young man & later in life he became a Barry Goldwater supporter, total opposite.

The review maybe a spoiler so if you rather not read further because of that, it would perhaps be wise. This book says it is about 3 soldiers but it was mostly about one in particular, John Andrews & many other soldiers. The other two main ones have other issues which makes the military hard on them. This book starts out with the drafting of some soldiers, overseas voyage to France which was described with all its horrors, the war, Armistice & keeping the peace until the troops leave. I was fascinated with the sentiment, the descriptions and the storyline but the main characters were quite unlikable to me & especially John Andrews but I enjoyed the story and will read more of John Dos Passos' novels.

There was such un American sentiment from this author & it was interesting as a young man he was socialist/communist & evolved as he aged to a conservative later in life. John Andrews kept mentioning slavery as regards to the military and his draft. It seems funny looking through 1921 eyes that the he sees USSR as having the right idea about rebellion and that they will be freer than a US soldier drafted who after the war can go back to life whereas the Soviet will be restricted & may have to serve longer depending on government whims. The peace conference after Armistice seem as described to be doomed, as already the defeated Germans are acting up. Knowing that the military is not perfect as anything else, it seems that the author painted more a negative light on the YMCA & rank officials. The soldiers overseas deployment sounded horrific, TB, sickness, packed like sardines & dead bodies thrown overboard. Today's military have that easier it seems. The song that the soldiers sang was cleaned up by the public. The sexual transmitted diseases was down played & as the promiscuity with French woman & excessive drinking.

John Andrews was unbearable young person who seemed to have such child like views that all centered on himself. The book was mostly about him. He thinks & hates his so called slavery in the military but goes along to a point but not anything farther. He finally finds a way to escape after the war ended by getting a military okay for attending a college in Paris for his music ability. It seems strange that the USA would approve such a scheme but he tries hard and convinces. He meets many friends & thinks he loves a girl Jeanne whose family was reduced after the war & she has to work herself. It seems she might love him in return but after he slept with her he decides he wishes he was in love with her. He decides not to see her again, she might have helped him after he deserted. He then meets Genevieve & does not like her but starts to after he decides she will help him with his music. They become friendly & go to the country to see her home. He is picked up by MP & they laugh at him stating he is in a college program. No trial just hard labor & he can't escape or prove his situation. He and another young kid decide to desert by going overboard & swimming to a French barge. It seems that John has only escaped & the other boy is unknown.

He is helped but wants to return to Paris even with all the MP & no longer wearing an uniform which was thrown overboard. He wants to see Genevieve & she is happy until he tells her about his situation. She is disgusted & she lets him down slowly. Her family leaves the country but only she knows of his activity, and tells him to leave the country. His landlady who when knowing he was friends with Genevieve was easier on him but after it came apparent that he was alone & penniless called the MP. He had Genevieve's gun but in the end he could not use it because the landlady took it away. They take him in the end.

Dan Fuselli was annoying also but not as bad. He wanted to advance but he could not and ended for some reason on KP duty. His girl Mebe who he stated he loved until he had found a French girl to have relations with & Mebe married someone else soon after he was deployed. Always thinking he was grand but every time.

Chrisfield was in rage & he ended killing Anderson with a grenade. He advances but deserts also but do to thinking someone knows about what he did in killing with rage. He did not mind being rank and file and not thinking.

OTR NBC University Theater link added - The book I remember being quite different but not too much.
https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com...

Not his best work, but readable.

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One of the reviews on this site said reading Three Soldiers is like watching a movie, “the best kind of movie.” One that doesn’t explain its images or dilute the story with too much exposition. Terrence Malick in his 1970s prime directed this in my head. Malick’s storytelling style would fit the austere and oblique parts of Three Soldiers, and the novel’s big theme of desertion would jive with one of Malick’s favorite motifs: the freebooting idylls of fugitives living it up before doom closes in—-a doom that always takes the form of pursuit through woods by armed men, be they the shotgun sheriffs of Badlands, the mounted police of Days of Heaven, or the Japanese jungle raiders in The Thin Red Line (there must be such a scene in The New World, but I’ll be damned if I sit through that again). Such pursuits, real and rumored, recur thorughout Three Soldiers, a novel concerned with discipline and punishment, with war as a steroid of the state, with desertion as spiritual renewal and on and on. The three main characters are constantly hearing, telling, re-telling, and fashioning nightmares from stories of other soldiers who could no longer take the humiliations, the drudgery, the merciless chickenshit of Army life and who struck an officer, or stole a car, or went on a bender, and then had to run from hunting parties of trigger-happy MPs.

Dos Passos’s portrayal of the organized chain of petty tyrannies that keep a war machine running to the standards of modern, “scientific” management necessarily attracts him to the misfits who use mobilization as a cover for personal errands, who somehow buck the system and do their own thing in its midst. None of the three main characters are in that category, they suffer more or less obediently, at least as long as the fighting lasts, but the narrative is shot through with incidental figures who just don’t give a fuck at all, who surf the inevitable snafus, and for whom America’s participation in the war means nothing but free passage to France, the freebooter’s dream kingdom of plentiful wine cellars and cream-fed country daughters. There’s “Wild” Dan Cohen, his garb a fool’s motley of Allied uniforms, his status a gray zone somewhere between soldier and deserter, with various courts-martial looming vaguely over his rackishly-hatted head. Dan was a driver in the army’s motor pool (like the black marketeer/fledgling pimp Tobey Maguire played in The Good German), and over a bottle of champagne mooched off more disciplined doughboys (staying straight had one advantage: a paycheck) tells them the story—-an eminently cinematic interlude—-of the time he was ordered to help drive a convoy of staff cars from depot A to depot B. His and a buddy’s cars brought up the rear, and they peeled off at every gin-mill and café along the route to belly up on cognac, and then drove like hell to catch up with the rest; eventually they lost the convoy altogether and, in the company of a few barely conscious officers on their own profound bender, took off on a joyride through various villages until one of the officers fell out and busted his head. Dan and his buddy survived a hail of MP bullets, were apprehended and sent straight to the front. Dan jumped out of the cattle car sending him to slaughter, chucked his rifle, and reported back to the motor pool, whose officers had been curious as to his fate. He never heard from his buddy again. “It’s a great war, I tell you,” Dan affirms. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

But back to the titular characters. There’s Fuselli, a simple-hearted naïf who goes to war thinking it’all be like D.W. Griffith, a careful conformist whose reaction to the obvious indignity and cruelty of his immediate society is to reassure himself that if he just keeps his mouth shut and gets noticed by the right people he’ll be promoted to corporal, and thereby be elevated a few privileged inches out of the engulfing bullshit. The army breaks him down anyway, which is either hilarious and totally what he deserves for being so passive, or else really, really sad (the downward mobility of much of the American middle class provokes a similar ambivalence in me). Chrisfield is an Indiana farm boy, Faulkernian before Faulkner. He inhabits a bubble of hallucinatory hillbilly violence—-pulling his knife on another soldier, detonating grenades in the night for kicks, fragging a wounded sergeant who once picked on him—-when not in the elevating (and restraining) company of Andrews, wayward haute bourgeois, Harvard man in the ranks; also, the novel’s Sensitive Soul, its artist-nerved register of the coarsening conditions. Andrews nourishes his superfine sensibility with the erotic fantasia of Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony, and harbors musical ambitions of an Art Nouveau/Ballet Russes lineage, absorbed in polishing fragments of a luscious tone poem he plans to call The Queen of Sheba.

The lean descriptive prose, the austerity and obliqueness that I’ve referred to as the novel’s best features co-exist fascinatingly with the garrulous soul-searching and cheeseball reveries of Andrews. Indirect discourse is indirect discourse, but still: one feels that both character and creator are half-baked; the distance between Dos Passos and Andrews, between the boy who suffers and the man who creates, appears much closer than that separating Joyce and Stephen Daedalus, Rilke and Malte Laurids Brigge. That’s to be expected, Three Soldiers was the second novel of a twenty-five year-old, and, with a publication date of 1921, very close to the wartime experiences that fed it. In this novel Dos Passos seems not yet emerged from the crisis of style then in vogue, portraying and in some sense experiencing it through Andrews. The mind in a youthful lyrical fervor undergoes a brutalizing nervous shock, and must accommodate an inescapable disillusion, must shape an aesthetic out of what’s unavoidably at hand. In the margins of The Queen of Sheba, Andrews occasionally dreams of a dry, rhythmic style, a white man’s jazz, with which he might set audiences aquiver by conveying the machined movements of infantry drill, as Honegger conveyed the locomotive (Pacific 231) and Prokofiev industrial labor (his Sovietish ballet Le Pas d’Acier, “the steel step ”).

The less articulate Fuselli and Chrisfield don’t hold forth, and their episodes show the novel at its freshest. Fuselli transfers to a headquarters company in hopes of getting noticed by the higher ups in a genteel indoors assignment. Enlisted men are slaves, so he’s mostly just cleans up. When this kind of thing happens to Andrews, he has feelings at paragraph length; Fuselli’s feelings are never explicitly described, but the depth of his disappointment is elegantly suggested by an exact account of what we don’t need to be told is a numbing and dispiriting servitude. The precise image of Fuselli cleaning a staircase, sweeping the dust down from step to step, is all the reader needs to see. At its best Three Soldiers is fine-grained and quietly devastating, a mosaic of striking images and sharp cinematic vignettes. Dos Passos shows the same mixture of pessimism, restraint and propriety I like in Richard Yates.

The man on the far left in the picture below—-General Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, a legendary hardass and old school disciplinarian—-would have been the last American officer to go on a cognac-fueled joyride through the French countryside, but the staff car, the cobblestones, and the café sign were props in Wild Dan Cohen’s adventure.

In the nearly one hundred years since its publication, Three Soldiers has been overshadowed by Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, though its influence was far more immediate on writers from the Second World War. The novel is unrelentingly pessimistic, not just anti-war but anti-military, a true polemic against an institution in which Dos Passos could apparently find nothing positive. And that's okay.

Despite being published in 1921, the style does not feel as dated as many other works from a similar time. I guess I just personally didn't connect with any of the characters, none of whom are really sympathetic or redeeming (even if that may be the point). Worth reading for anyone interested in how the American war fiction genre came to be shaped and formed during its early years, but otherwise more interesting for literary history than general readers.

The structure of this book is a bit odd. The first section deals largely with an enlisted man named Fusilli. He is ambitious, and somewhat desperate to climb the ranks. For a number of reasons, after some initial hope, his ambitions are thwarted. After this first section, we see him once more, and hear about him on maybe two other occasions. But he is the first of the three soldiers, and he seems to have found his place in the army.

The second soldier, who is the centerpiece of the second section of the book, is Chrisfield. He is a hot head. He bears a grudge and he is rebelling against the discipline imposed on him by the army. This ultimately leads to him killing a superior. After that, he basically disappears from the book, coming back towards the end and revealing that he has found his own kind of peace with the army after having gotten his revenge.

The last four sections of the book center around Anderson. He hates the army, and sees his position as being basically a slave. He basically wants to live a modest, free life and develop as a musician. The book follows him through the war, which is mostly far away from combat doing drudgery. Then some brief, chaotic combat. An extended trip to a hospital to rehabilitate a wound. And then more tension between his extended duty in the army, for seemingly long after the war ends, and his desire to compose music and play the piano.

Overall, the book feels realistic, and is very harsh about the nature of the army, the casual evil and corruption of the people in charge, the humiliations involved in advancement, and the basic injustice of the draft. But here's my basic difficulty with it -- all "three soldiers" are basically dumbasses and not particularly likable. True, there are other people in the book who are even worse, but there is little in the book to make me engage with any of the main characters. For all of Anderson's love of music, it appears that Dos Passos doesn't know enough about music to bring this across. As a result, for me, Anderson ends up feeling a bit shallow.

That said, there's enough that's good in this book that I'm glad I read it. I remember liking the USA trilogy even more, but that was years ago and I can't actually say that I remember anything specific about it except that it was obviously sympathetic to socialism and that I quite enjoyed it. I don't know if that says more about Dos Passos' ability as a writer, or about my bad memory and shortcomings as a reader.

The army is fuckeddddd

Novela primeriza. Se nota.