User:TerrellHarrell/sandbox4

In the classical taxonomic terms of Northrop Frye, From Here to Eternity is very much what Frye means by a“novel.”Its characters do indeed wear“their personae or social masks” (Frye, “The Four Forms” 584). Robert E. Lee Prewitt is very much a Private First Class, Milton Anthony Warden a Sergeant, and Ms.Karen Holmes a housewife. (They are vivid and memorable, yet seldom capitalize much on eccentrics as mark such well-remembered Dickens characters as David Copperfield’s Mr. Macawber or Martin Chuzzlewit’s Seth Pecksniff.) The book’s stable societal framework is the U.S. Army just preceding World War II. Right at Eternity’s outset, we are given the novelistic focus on a character in a social context:

When he finished packing, he walked out onto the third-floor porch of the barracks, brushing the dust from his hands. He was a very neat and deceptively slim young man in summer khakis that were still fresh early in the morning.

He leaned his elbows on the porch edge and stood looking down through the screen at the familiar scene of the barracks square laid out below, with the tiers of porches dark in the face of the three-story concrete barracks fronting the square. He felt a half-familiar affection for this vantage point that he was leaving.

Below him, under the blows of the February Hawaiian sun, the quadrangle gasped defenselessly like an exhausted fighter. Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust, a muted orchestra of sounds emerged: the clankings of steel-wheeled carts bouncing over brick, the slappings of oiled leather sling straps, the shuffling beat of scorched shoe soles, and the hoarse expletives of irritated noncoms.

He thought these things had become your heritage somewhere along the line. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them by renouncing the place they given you.(3)

By the end of Chapter Two, we know of the principal protagonist, Prewitt, whose place in the Company he is leaving, and we know something about the Kentucky mountains from which he hails. Within a few more chapters, Prewitt is deeply engaged in his new world of Company G: the stern but fatherly Warden, the jokester's friend Pfc. Maggio, company commander Holmes, and the numerous sharply drawn men who will "soljer" and chat and play cards with Prewitt and try to force him to box for the Company or almost make him wish he had, including Anderson, Bloom, Chaote, Kowalski, Leva, Mazzioli, Preem, and Stark.

The dialogue is masterful. Physical and social action is evoked by concrete description and adept use of the empathetic first-person indirect, a vivid and seamlessly shifting point of view on the action and its social circumstance. If there is a mode of writing other than Frye's "novel" that is aptly evoked by Eternity, it is Frye's  "drama" in which the author hides from the audience and their direct experience (Anatomy 239). Characters jump off the page, as in this early exchange between Prewitt and Maggio: