Thomas Edwards feels that Jones "may have been the last prominent American novelist to suppose that fiction should be a virtually unmediated presentation of life." Jones tended to rely on explanatory narrative which conveys trains of thought without attempting to reproduce them exactly.

Often, both Jones and his characters seem to share a difficulty in expressing themselves, and the narrative becomes muddled in syntactic horrors and illogical confusion. Jones's strength in From Here to Eternity, his sharply-noted dialogue, liberated the American novel from the disruptive asterisk and recorded an idiom that, whatever its inelegance, is incontrovertibly honest.

Jones thought it "perfectly legitimate" to use four-letter words to describe people "who did, or would, use fourletter words," because he considered it "a process of educating us to what we really are rather than what we would like to say we are." In practice, his artistic integrity in reproducing military...