In the following excerpt, Quinones argues that The Caine Mutiny is "deeply flawed," but that this flaw lends literary interest to the work and also invites analysis of the story from a historical perspective.

Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny [is] concerned with defining the nature of the American experience, wherein the character of Cain becomes something of a national type.…

The Caine Mutiny has been a remarkably successful novel, with close to 250,000 volumes in thirteen printings in the first eight months of its publication. But our interest does not lie in the book's success, but rather in its failure. Deeply flawed, The Caine Mutiny is of great interest precisely because of that flaw. The fault line that runs through the work amounts to a recantation of the dynamic of the Sacred Executioner, the pattern of which in many of its variations we have been following. What Wouk...