SOURCE: "Styron's Farewell to Arms: Writing on the Military," in William Styron, Ungar, 1987, pp. 71-89.

Here, Ruderman observes that Mannix, by virtue of his suffering and indomitable will against the impersonality of the military, achieves a heroic triumph.

Three of Styron's major works of fiction are focused centrally on the military: The Long March, In the Clap Shack, and The Way of the Warrior (in progress). In the first two of these, published twenty years apart, war is emblematic of human existence: its bureaucracy and impersonality represent all institutions; the isolation and fear of its combatants are the primary conditions of modern life.

Lieutenant Culver of The Long March, like many of Styron's protagonists, looks nostalgically from a chaotic present into an Edenic past. He has left behind a law practice, his family, and the strains of Haydn, Bach, and Mozart reverberating through peaceful Sunday afternoons in New...