Historical Fiction

In A Soldier’s Heart, Gary Paulsen writes, even though “war is always, in all ways, appalling, [because] lives are stopped in youth, worlds are ended, and even for those who survive. . . , the mental damage done is often permanent” (xiii), we still persist in such violence. 

Perhaps the violence is all unreal unless you’ve served and seen first hand the carnage.  After all, the songs and slogans and parades paint war with patriotic color.  For a boy wishing to prove himself a man, the temptation is often irresistible, as it is for fifteen year old Charley who has a strong desire to fight with the Union Army during the Civil War, to accept his chance to be a man.  His naiveté is so thick he tells his mother, “I won’t get into any trouble, Ma” (4).  He doesn’t then know that war is as ugly as his father’s death, being “kicked to death by a horse gone mad when a swarm of bees landed on it” (5).

Even in boot camp, the affair feels like “a lot of play acting” (8) for Charley, since all the soldiers do is “drill and sweat and listen to sergeants and corporals bellow” (10).  Former students of mine have used similar lines to describe the boot camps of today, so I trust that not much has changed on this front.  And the lure of never beens is still strong.  Just as Charley has never been on a train ride, never ridden on a steam boat, never seen Wisconsin, never marched in a parade before, many contemporary young men and women are lured by possibility—to travel, serve their country, enjoy a soldier’s honor (“one of the few, the proud”), or earn money for college.  The slogans sell with invitations like “Aim High” or “Be all you can be” and promises that “It’s not just a job. It’s an adventure!” 

Charley is also lured by the desire to “stop the law breakers and wrong thinkers” (15), to teach them a lesson.  Today the words might differ, but the message is the same. 

In reading Charley’s story, I marveled at Paulsen’s stylistic choices.  At the end of Chapter Three, Charley has fallen asleep on a lulling train ride.  Without warning or transition, Chapter Four thrusts us in the midst of the Battle at Bull Run: “Bullets filled the air.  Charley heard them going past his ears like horizontal hail and he decided to lie down.  If he didn’t lie down, he would be hit, ripped, torn to pieces” (24).  Paulsen’s strong verbs and vivid participles intensify and give detail to the scene and its action.  Along with Charley, the reader implores God: “How can you let this happen?” (25).  With his style, Paulsen imitates the war—the waiting, the fear, the inactivity that so abruptly turns to fighting and then to death: the bloated bodies, clouds of flies, and sweet, cloying smells of decaying flesh.  Just like the staccato of gunfire, Paulsen’s sentences clip and declare and then stumble one upon another, like bodies falling—a stroke of syntactic genius.

After his first battle, Charley heaves “until he felt his very soul would leave him” (26).  The world is absent of beauty.  Morbidity even enters the hospital area, where they use bodies of the dead like bricks to build a wall against the wind and the cold.  There are other constants, too:  “There is always fear and always a meadow” (76).

Knowing he must kill or be killed, during his second battle, Charley encounters a savage rage that transforms him into an animal: “He would have been shocked to see himself.  His lips were drawn back showing his teeth, and his face was contorted by a savage rage.  He wanted to kill them. . . . All of them.  Stick and jab and shoot them and murder them and kill them all. . . . He was out of himself, beside himself, an animal” (50-51).  Yet, he did not want to kill the horses; the horses were work animals and did not seek to harm him.  Oh, the compassion that floats amid such muck.

                Paulsen is relentless in his battle scene portrayals: “After that there was no order, no sense, no plan.  Charley became a madman.  He attacked anything and everything that came into his range—slashing, clubbing, hammering, jabbing, cutting,--and always screaming, screaming in fear, in anger and finally in a kind of rabid, insane joy, the joy of battle, the joy of winning, the joy of killing to live” (84).

            When the “butchery” is done, the reader is not only surprised that Charley is alive but that he can still remember “all the sweet things” (97), that beauty can exist for him at all again: “Waving pretty girls, Southern summer mornings, cheering children, dew on a leaf” (97).

Teaching Ideas

Although I consider this book appropriate to the middle school level, the teacher will need to caution students that some of the scenes are quite graphic, the violence horrific, and the images of dead bodies numerous and revolting.

1)     Reread pages 79-80.  How does Paulsen make the scene come to life? 

2)    Paulsen is a master with the absolute phrase and with parallel structure: “He stood with the rifle hanging at his side, his bayonet bent at the tip, the stock shattered, his arms weak, his legs soft, his hest heaving as he sucked air, his throat rasping” (84-85).  Write a sentence of your own that imitates Paulsen’s style.

3)    Examine some military slogans; what do you think of them?  What are their purpose?  How do they work?

4)    What does it mean to have a “soldier’s heart”?

5)     Read the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen.  While Owen’s poem is about World War I, not the Civil War, how is it similar to Paulsen’s theme?

6)    Read Patricia Polacco’s children’s book about the Civil War, Pink and Say.  How is it similar to Paulsen’s story; how is it different?  Do you think children should read books about war?  Why/why not?