Pat Conroy's first novel, The Great Santini (1976), is a curious blend of lurid reality and fantastic comedy, which deals with approximately one year in the life of Ben Meecham and his family. It is primarily a novel of initiation, but central to the concept of Ben's initiation into manhood and to the meaning of the whole novel is the idea that individual myths must be stripped away from Ben and the other major characters before Ben can approach reality with objectivity and maturity. In The Great Santini individual myths seem to consume the characters, functioning as ways of perceiving the world and as cushions against the reality that myths seem to ignore.

The title of the novel emphasizes the important role myths play, since "The Great Santini" is the identity Colonel Bull Meecham assumes when he wishes to assert his unquestionable authority as head of his household. The Great Santini, however, is merely one facet of the mythos which controls Bull Meecham's life. Colonel Meecham is a Marine Corps fighter pilot of more than twenty years service at the time of the action of the novel…. He sees the Marine Corps of the early 1960's as a perversion of the traditions he remembers from his early years in the Corps, immediately before and during World War II, but his awareness of change does not keep Bull from adopting his faulty memories as a way of life…. Because Bull is unwilling or unable to change his attitudes at will, he has endangered his relationship with his family; each member of the family recognizes that Bull might react to any family situation, from a backyard game of one-on-one basketball with his son, Ben, to arranging the house on moving day, with the same intensity and violence he would unleash in a dogfight.

That the Old Corps myth serves as both a cover and a crutch for the real Bull Meecham is evident in several revealing scenes. The first intimation that a far more sensitive man than we suspect lies beneath Bull's mask is his reaction to Zell Posey's confession of how he attempted to join the service during World War II. As Posey, who lost his leg as a child in a boating accident, speaks sincerely of his desires, Bull is described as "fidgeting as he always did when someone stripped away an outer layer of himself and revealed something intensely personal," as though he is made uncomfortable at the thought that all men are really two people: the public, mythic self and the real, private man. The nature of the private man who lurks inside the mythic, Old Corps Bull is seen only in glimpses, the most important of which is the revelation of Bull's overpowering fear of death: "Bull himself was obsessed by a carefully concealed fear that he would die in a plane, and he knew that death in flight could assume many shapes."… Clearly, Bull uses the myth of The Great Santini's invulnerability not only to conceal his fear from others but to blunt his realization that death was a real possibility each time he climbed behind the controls of a jet fighter.

Lillian, Bull's wife, also has a protective myth in which to believe when the stress of real situations becomes too great. Born and raised in a Southern Baptist family, Lillian became a convert to Catholicism before marrying Bull. The result of her conversion is a hybrid religion in which she focuses her Baptist zeal on the icons and rituals of Catholicism in much the same way as Bull focuses his energy on the trappings and traditions of the Marine Corps. Perhaps the chief symbol of the true nature of Lillian's variation of Catholicism is her "shrine," composed of a number of Catholic icons—statuettes of the Virgin Mary and the Archangel Michael, a crucifix, and a font of holy water—but placed within it incongruously is a plastic model of an F-8 Crusader. The anachronistic presence of the fighter among Lillian's religious treasures suggests that those treasures, together with her beliefs, serve as the same sort of buffer from fear as Bull's myth of The Great Santini. (pp. 32-3)

Conroy makes clear that one of his novel's most important concerns is Ben's search for something in which to believe. Therefore, Ben "tries on" many beliefs of others and discards most of them because they do not suit him. Ben can, at times, be awed by the power of ritual and tradition related to the Catholic/Marine myth, as when Bull gives him a World-War-II-vintage flight jacket for his birthday…. But Ben is destined never to accept the Catholic/Marine concept of God as "the hellmaker, the firelover, the predatory creator," choosing rather to believe in the baby Jesus of Christmas who "would not send anyone to the flames."… However, Ben ultimately dismisses Catholicism and all formal religion because he cannot reconcile the contradictions of a system which is taught by the alcoholic Father Pinckney and the old shrew, Sister Loretta, with his perception of Catholicism as analogous to sex, in that both are life-giving.

Clearly, much of Ben's search for a private mythology is inextricably caught up in his vision of the ideal father. Just as Ben makes a conscious choice to believe, at least briefly, in God as the infant Jesus rather than God as the wrathful Old Testament Jehovah, he spends much of the novel contrasting all the father figures who happen into his life to Bull, who sees himself as a sort of latter-day Jehovah. From the family's past, we have memories of Major Finch, a better pilot than Bull despite his not having "to drink and brag and kick his kids around."… Vergil Hedgepath, Ben's godfather, also serves to illustrate that a man can command respect without cruelty. Toomer Smalls fulfills the role of surrogate father by teaching Ben all the secrets of Southern boyhood which Bull dismisses as meant only for girls. Finally, Dave Murphy, Coach Spinks, and Mr. Dacus all seem to embody, at one time or another, Ben's vision of the coach as ideal father.

No doubt we are to make a connection between sports and religion or, more properly, to see sports as a religion which not only creates happiness but supplies purpose. For example, basketball is seen more as a moral system than a game…. (pp. 33-4)

Ben's religious commitment, then, through a major part of The Great Santini is to the closed value system of sports, but much of the point of the novel involves Ben's initiation into manhood, during which sports must necessarily be supplanted by a more practical and realistic system of belief. Ben's ultimate realization about the religion of sports is that it is the best system in the world if it remains inviolate. If, however, the real world with all its chaos and misery imposes itself on this artificial "life reduced to a set of rules," then the codified life becomes more chaotic and miserable than the real world, as seen in the horrible lingering death of Coach Dave Murphy in a cancer ward and in Ben's breaking Peanut Abbott's arm during the biggest game of the year. (p. 35)

One of the things we realize about Ben's search for belief through most of the novel is that, despite his claims concerning his differences with Bull, it is completely conditioned by Bull's attitudes: Ben is a Catholic because Bull is, Ben is an athlete because Bull was, and all signs point to the possibility that, if Bull had not died, Ben would have attended a mediocre college, gone to flight school after graduation, and become a Marine pilot just like Bull. While Bull is alive, Ben not only lives in the shadow of the Santini myth but feels a need to compete with the myth. Bull's death changes all Ben's possibilities, as well as his way of viewing the Santini myth. If his search has been shielded by that myth through most of the novel, then we can also see Ben growing away from the protection that following in the shadow of The Great Santini affords. Ben's progression away from dependence upon his father begins long before Bull's death, an event which wrenches Ben from the security of his father's shadow to a more objective perspective.

The first hint we have of Ben's progress beyond Santini is his decision to disobey a direct order to help Toomer Smalls when Ben suspects he is in trouble. Earlier in the novel Ben's strategy for peaceful coexistence was to stay away from Bull and anger him as little as possible, but with friendship and loyalty on the line, Ben risks Bull's wrath, takes his punishment, and explains his action when Bull asks why he has disobeyed an order: "Because you'd have done it. Santini would have done it."… Paradoxically, by acting more like his father, Ben develops the independence of mind which will ultimately free him from Santini. (pp. 35-6)

Clearly, Ben loves his father, but we must not think that Ben has become another version of Bull simply because he, wearing Bull's flight jacket, assumes his father's role for the family's return to Atlanta [after Bull's death]…. His task now is to evaluate his position in what he describes as "a Santiniless world,"… and his objective evaluation of his place in that world is the most convincing evidence for Ben's having reached a new level of maturity and independence…. [To] deny his father's overpowering identity, Ben twice insists: "I am not Santini" …; in the first act of his newly realized freedom, he imagines a different sort of god, composed of the best qualities of all his family and friends. The god, pieced together from experience, has none of Bull's qualities and is the completely benevolent father Ben has searched for throughout the novel. Logically, Ben uses the new god to reinforce his earlier experience of independence—when he loathed his father's drunken brutality, but fought that brutality with love—by using him to translate all the hate he had felt for Santini into love. Such love is the result of Ben's independence and the perspective he has gained as a consequence of his passage into manhood, and his recognition that "the hatred would return" … only reinforces the idea that Ben has reconciled himself to the myth his father projected and, finally, can allow himself his true feelings toward the true Santini.

The story of Ben Meecham's initiation into the world of his fathers, therefore, is essentially a story of the experiences which deflate the protective myths that individuals build around themselves as buffers against day to day chaos and tragedy. In the end, that Ben reconciles himself to his father's death is not so important, because he has learned to use his experience to assess his father in human rather than mythic terms. Ben, with the reader, comes to realize that, tragically, when Bull Meecham goes down in flames, the most hidden, most human parts of him die, while the myth of The Great Santini lives on. (pp. 36-7)