User:KaraCroissant/sandbox: Difference between revisions

With all of this in mind, one can also clearly see how Hemingway’s Cantwell represents the sacrificial soldier for a modern bureaucratic army, the transfigured Jackson, who dies at the moment of his greatest victory. While Jackson’s death is heroic, Cantwell’s is ignominious in that his greatest victory is not a military one, but merely a personal one. His is a modern, reductive victory over himself and the acceptance of his death. Cantwell is merely another soldier who has had to pay the price of modern warfare. On the other hand, Mailer’s Cummings forms another face on the coin, but of a different type. He is the emotionless sacrificer—the general who has minted Grant’s legacy into a modern, sociopathic coinage. As these two allusions to the American Civil War demonstrate, these two major writers of the Twentieth Century, whose legacies will remain influential throughout the Twenty-First century, understood the influence of this conflict on the American psyche. Mailer and Hemingway, both veterans of war themselves, viscerally understood this war’s enormous costs created a trauma that permeates and promulgates the modern vernacular and literature, illuminating the point that the American Civil War, especially in the costs that it took to fight it, accelerated the dramatic shift to the modern sensibility.