Three Soldiers
by John Dos Passos
Summary
Dos Passos follows three American soldiers of very different backgrounds through the First World War, letting the army itself, rather than the enemy, be the force that grinds each of them down. Dan Fuselli, an Italian American store clerk from San Francisco serving in the Medical Corps, spends the war chasing promotion to corporal, eager for the prestige of rank; his story ends after the armistice with him still an army private, run into by chance in Paris smelling of army kitchens and admitting he has been in a labor battalion, his ambitions quietly deflated rather than dramatically crushed. Chrisfield, a farm boy from Indiana, grows to hate a sergeant named Anderson who has made his army life miserable, and when he comes upon the man, by then commissioned a lieutenant and lying wounded in a wood during an advance, he kills him with a grenade; he later deserts outright, and the novel simply loses him in the postwar crowd, unpunished and going nowhere. Andrews, a musically gifted Harvard graduate, questions the army's purpose from early on and eventually deserts as well, following a wound, to live under a false identity in Paris, where he falls for a young Frenchwoman named Genevieve and throws himself into composing an ambitious musical piece about John Brown. His attempt at a private, self made postwar life does not last; military authorities catch up with him, and the novel ends with his arrest, the composition he had staked his freedom on left unfinished.
Dos Passos wrote from his own wartime service as an ambulance driver, and the novel's real subject is the machinery of military discipline itself rather than combat, a choice that scandalized readers who expected a patriotic account so soon after the armistice. It reads as a genuinely angry book, moving between its three men's very different disillusionments without ever softening any of them into an uplifting ending.
Dos Passos went on to write the U.S.A. trilogy, and Three Soldiers is usually read as the earlier, more directly autobiographical dry run for the institutional critique that trilogy later expanded across the whole of American society.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer Prize for the Novel awarded in 1922 went to Booth Tarkington's Alice Adams, a small town comedy of manners, and Three Soldiers received no prize despite its impact on public opinion. George H. Doran Company published it that year, and H. L. Mencken, writing in The Smart Set, credited it with changing the whole tone of American opinion about the war, arguing no American war novel afterward could avoid being measured against it.
The book stands as one of the earliest and bluntest American novels to treat World War I as dehumanizing rather than heroic, a tone that anticipated the disillusioned war fiction of the following decade more directly than most of its contemporaries. Dos Passos never won a major American literary prize for it, and its reputation rests instead on its influence on the generation of antiwar and institutional critique novels that followed, including his own later, more ambitious U.S.A. trilogy.