After considerable critical denigration of Some Came Running (1957), which he had inadvisedly announced as "the greatest novel we've had in America," Jones wrote the second novel in his World War II trilogy, The Thin Red Line, the story of the Battle of Guadalcanal from the collective point of view of C-for-Charlie Company, formerly of Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. Jones claims that he "tried to write the same people more like they really were in life than they were in literature, in Eternity" when he created The Thin Red Line. In this de-romanticizing process, his collective protagonist is C-for-Charlie itself, "louts," he said, "concerned with their own dignity." He was attempting to explore what he called "the fact that a man, in order to preserve his dignity, is willing to take away almost anybody else's."

By sketching nearly every possible reaction to some of the most horrifying...