Documentalization and naturalization as vector strategies of the narrative structure in James Jones’s The Thin Red Line
DOI: 10.23951/1609-624X-2026-3-110-117
The article examines how narrative strategies are realized in James Jones’s novel The Thin Red Line. The theoretical framework is V.I. Tyupa’s concept of narrative strategies, which makes it possible to reconstruct the internal organization of narration as a system of communicative intentions, modes of focalization, and regimes of representing experience. The analysis of the novel’s artistic structure reveals the interaction of two principal vectors – naturalization and documentalization – which jointly construct a multilayered model of wartime experience and configure a hybrid chronotope. The strategy of naturalization operates at the imagistic and descriptive levels: the text produces extreme material concreteness, topographically specifies the landscape and combat positions, and details weaponry, army routine, and a specific idiom; the transforming and traumatic experience is rendered both reflexively and through minute sensory notations. The characters’ interior discourse is organized as an alternation of interior monologue and free indirect discourse; the figure of the “reflective hero” functions as an instrument of selfobservation, self-splitting, and estrangement. The study underscores Jones’s continuity with the naturalist tradition in analyzing human behavior under extreme conditions, including motifs of determinism and the demythologization of the heroic. The strategy of documentalization is implemented through autobiographical elements, factual precision in reconstructing combat episodes, techniques of an “effect of presence,” and motif-thematic correlations with real events of the Second World War. The functions of the unreliable narrator and the image of a “collective hero” secure a plurality of perspectives, a polyphony of viewpoints, and a loosening of the linear chronotope. A cumulative type of narration and a montage-like composition shape a fragmentary, mosaic perception of events; temporal shifts, repetition, retardation, and shifts in angle intensify the effect of chaos and semantic indeterminacy. Throughout, the article argues that the synergy of naturalization and documentalization constitutes a structural invariant of Jones’s entire Army Trilogy, as corroborated by comparative observations on the other novels in the cycle. The conclusion substantiates the hybrid artistic structure of the novel (chronicle-like features, autobiographism, naturalist optics, elements of mythopoetics) and interprets Jones’s narrative strategy as a mode of comprehending wartime experience through narrative decentration, traumatic memory, and individualized consciousness, which aligns the text with key practices of postwar modernism.
Keywords: The Thin Red Line, James Jones, war prose, documentation, naturalization, narrative strategies
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Issue: 3, 2026
Series of issue: Issue 3
Rubric: RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND LITERATURE OF THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD
Pages: 110 — 117
Downloads: 120