Cannot leave because I disagree, because, as he says, it’s all in the hands of God. You can refuse to lead īut I cannot do even that. He takes us, the readers, inside the heads of his principals. Shaara uses another technique available only to writers of fiction. “General,” Longstreet said slowly, “it is my considered opinion that a frontal assault here would be a disaster.” If I move Hood and McLaws, the whole rear of this army is open. There are thirty thousand men on those heights. If I move my people forward, we’ll have no flank at all simply swing around and crush us. Longstreet said, “Sir, there are now three Union corps on those rocky hills, on our flank. Do you expect me to attack again the same high ground which they could not take yesterday, at full strength?” Longstreet said, “Sir, my two divisions, Hood and McLaws, lost almost half their strength yesterday. When exchanges take place between the principal actors, the reader is with them on the roads, behind the stone walls, sharing coffee beside a mess tent, climbing the heights under fire. This is because Michael Shaara keeps his point of view at ground level. Hill, Pickett, Chamberlain (so that we get almost no verbal clues from sergeants or privates or troops on the field)-the action still feels absolutely grounded to the grimy reality of front-line warfare. “Gettysburg,” he said.Īnd though virtually all the “speaking parts” are of generals-Lee, Longstreet, Ewell, A.P. There was one gap east of Chambersburg and beyond that all the roads came together, weblike, at a small town. The mountains rose like a rounded wall between them and the Union Army. straight information that the reader needs to know if she is going to understand the story-is delivered not by some Omniscient Author or objective third-party narrator, but through dialogue between the principal characters. Much of what dramatists call “exposition”-i.e. Shaara thought it through deeply and arrived at his solution. How does Michael Shaara deliver to the reader the massive amount of information about topography and time, troop movements, strategic planning, weather, alterations and overthrows of fortune, within the incredibly complex tale of the battle? This question, I’m certain, was not resolved by accident or whim.
Here are a couple of observations on the subject of “How the hell did he do that?”-just between us chickens.
The book won the Pulitzer Prize and it deserved to. I’ve been reading Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels-fiction (but very, very real) about the battle of Gettysburg. Michael Shaara’s “The Killer Angels” won the Pulitzer in 1975 Forgive me, every once in a while I can’t stop myself from delivering a post purely about narrative technique.
0 kommentar(er)
