| We usually associate Samuel Clemens, Henry Adams, William Dean Howells and Henry James with the later nineteenth-century, the world of their mature careers. But they also belonged to the Civil War generation, as did many in their audiences. When they included a Civil War veteran in stories and novels, they did something interesting with a familiar historical figure.; “Civil War veteran” is easily more than a nuance to a character's biography. Under normal exercise of the imagination by his author and by his reader, his identity gathers historical depth and perspective. Correspondingly, his story is no longer simply about “today.” The past enters the setting and with it an expectation, maybe, of parable on the theme of history.; The Civil War veterans in Clemens's “Lucretia Smith's Soldier,” The Gilded Age and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, in Howells's A Foregone Conclusion, The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes, in Adams's Democracy and Esther, and in James's “The Story of a Year,” “Poor Richard,” “A Most Extraordinary Year,” The American and The Bostonians, are not only major characters or even main characters but also are significantly developed as veterans.; Moving from the earliest tales to the last novels, we are led by their authors' senses of the war, and especially by their senses of their veterans, to regard historical and literary approaches to what we would call modernity, a sense that fidelity to reality cuts off the conscious life from its historical past. The complication is that because the past propagated the war the past is responsible for the war's unintended consequences, one of which is this modernity. In one way or another, the war was a revelation of irony, error, blindness and a terrible truth about the nature of things. The veterans carry this news of change with them, whether or not they realize it or want to.; Given this popular subject matter and these well-known authors, it is counterintuitive yet true that these narrative investments in Civil War veterans are rarely paid attention to in the commentaries. |
