Critical Evaluation
Mister Roberts is an ancestor of such works as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961). What Mister Roberts embodies—and this has also been absorbed by Heller—is the irreverent tone of the novel and its sometimes stunning mix of the wildly comic and the deeply tragic. The often sudden switch from verbal comedy or even slapstick to dramatic is something many may readily identify with Catch-22 and the film MASH (1970) in which death, pain, passion, and foolishness follow one another very quickly.
Mister Roberts, published in 1946, is certainly one of the first texts to deal with the U.S. military, patriotism, and heroism, in the context of World War II, with something less than rigid respect. At least half of Thomas Heggen’s novel is comic and satiric, designed to amuse the reader and make fun of military procedure, structures, and what passes for military service in some contexts.
Occasionally, the comedy in Mister Roberts is very broad, almost surreal. The name of the ship, the USS Reluctant, and the names of Pacific Ocean islands it passes or visits (Apathy, Tedium, Ennui, Elysium, and the Limbo Islands), are conceived as either humorous description or parody of the strange names of the real Pacific islands that figured in campaigns waged during the war.
Many of the comic activities in Mister Roberts are things associated with the lighter side of military life: discussions about sex, parties fueled by homemade alcoholic beverages, practical jokes, conspiracies against difficult officers, and gambling. In the novel’s last half, Heggen changes his tone radically in several instances, and this narrative move toward tragedy culminates in the title character’s death. Heggen’s narrative takes a serious turn with the story of Big Gerhart’s bullying of one of the young seamen, Red Stevens, who had shipped out fourteen months after his marriage. Gerhart is a man who delights in being cruel to those seemingly weaker than he; in the chapter devoted to the confrontation between him and Stevens, he is first seen mistreating a dog. Later, looking for another target, he picks on Stevens.
Gerhart begins to needle Stevens about being away from his young wife, gradually increasing the suggestiveness of his remarks, asking about Stevens’s sexual activities and finally pointing out that Stevens can hardly expect such a pretty young wife to remain faithful while her husband is at sea. To Gerhart’s surprise and to the surprise of onlookers, Red hits Gerhart with a wrench. Stevens is given a harmless summary court-martial, but he wins the sympathies of his shipmates and of the reader. In another moving episode, Frank Thompson receives word that his child has drowned. He asks for emergency leave to attend the funeral and see his wife, but permission is denied. The last image readers have of Thompson is of him maniacally playing Monopoly, as was his frequent custom, the image of a man driven to frantic despair by grief and frustration.
Eventually, in the spring of 1945, Roberts comes to suspect that the war has passed him by, that he has spent his years of service aboard the Reluctant while other men elsewhere have seen action and have perhaps distinguished themselves. What worries Roberts is that he has missed his chance at heroism—again. He had tried to join the Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930’s, but that war ended before he could participate; he had tried to join the British Royal Air Force in 1940, but had been denied because of a dental problem.
In a conversation with the Reluctant ’s doctor, Roberts cannot really explain why he wants to fight in...
(This entire section contains 881 words.)
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the war; he can only indicate that he has a compulsion to do so. While he has no illusions about heroism (he bemoans the fact that people forget too easily those who died in the war), he feels that the best men were those who, through some strange natural-selection process, were good enough to do the fighting. As for Roberts, all he has to show for his service is a medal struck by his friends in recognition of his pitching the captain’s beloved palm tree overboard. Nevertheless, he does eventually succeed in being transferred to another ship—a destroyer still active in the Pacific theater.
The terrible irony is that, as Mister Roberts ends, Roberts becomes an example of war’s tragic waste. He dies in a kamikaze attack on the ship on which he is serving—a perfect example, as he had thought, that not all casualties are heroes. What is worse is that his death is a horrible accident, a meaningless incident near the end of a war already won, and one then being waged by desperate Japanese pilots who hope only to inflict the most damage possible before defeat. In the same attack, another officer on the ship is killed while drinking coffee in the wardroom. Roberts’s death has no more significance in the broad picture of the war than does the death of the other officer.
In the novel’s moving denouement, Ensign Pulver creates a memorial for Roberts—by doing what Roberts would do if he were still alive and still aboard the Reluctant. He throws the rest of the captain’s palm trees over the ship’s side.