Disciplinary Power and the Capitalist War Machine : World War I in John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers

Disciplinary Power and the Capitalist War Machine : World War I in John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers

As a novelist and a self-claimed historian as well, John Dos Passos attempts to portray a historical phase of American capitalism in the early twentieth century. His war novel, Three Soldiers, also portrays one of the historical phases, the World War. By means of its modernist styles and techniques, employed to narrate the experiences of the three soldiers, the novel presents us the disciplinary power of the capitalist war machine as a whole. For Dos Passos, understanding the disciplinary power of capitalist institutions is the key for representing an aesthetic totality of the World War. In this respect, with the help of Michel Foucault’s genealogical study of modern disciplinary systems in Discipline and Punish, this essay will discuss the relationship between the disciplinary power of the capitalist war machine and its omnipotent influence to individuals. Juxtaposing the episodes concerning three hero’s desperate and tragic experiences, the novel tells us how the disciplinary power degrades human beings into mere cogs of the military machine, thereby shattering their hope and dignity. In other words, through the despair and frustration of the three soldiers, Three Soldiers testimonies the inhumane cruelty committed by the disciplinary power in a modern frontier of American capitalism, the World War.