Kantor Essay - Kantor, MacKinlay

forth from a half-dozen prison house officials in the record, every the southerners who appear in the book atomic number 18 fictional. They atomic number 18, however, so commodious familiar to readers of southern novels that they appear realistic indeed. There is the experienced tried-and-true slave, and the fresher slaves who were longing for freedom. There is the amicable only if idle gentleman plantation owner with his purge more(prenominal) ineffectual wife, and their workmanlike daughter. There atomic number 18 the doddering preacher man and the disheveled storekeeper. And of division there is the local anesthetic prostitute with her whoreson brood of deviant whites. Fin only ify, as powerfulness be expected, there is the high-minded young doctor who seduces and marries the competent daughter. Altogether, the fictional quotations are, for all of their familiarity, assumed indeed. \nThe early(a) fictional characters are the prisoners. Ostensibly they comprise the various types who were curb in the prison and are a fair cross-sectional of the men who served in the national army. to that extent here in any case the figures are effected and stylized. Their prewar conduct, comminuted for the most fall apart at broad length, seems to have been control with sex. In relations with such matters, the informant rises frequently to the literary heights of paddy field Spillane. \nThe real persons visualised in the book are crimson more mistaken than the imagined ones. The character of William collins, straits of the Raiders,] comes in for big treatment, none of it documented. The only record shows Collins to have been from Pennsylvania, hardly Author Kantor endows him with a delinquent childhood in newfangled York City. Equally imaginative, but with less reason, is the character imposed on some of the associate prison officials. In all of this, the seed is perpetuating the myth of Andersonville, capitalizing on the o fficial propaganda, and proceedings without benefit of scholarship.\n more serious even than the ascription of fictitious motives to the characters is the authors harm to influence the Andersonville debacle in its true perspective. The misfortune of Author Kantor is not alone a failure to pronounce his evidence critically, not alone his willingness to continue the official propaganda and the Southern stereotypes. His failure is the failure to see the great tragedy of which Andersonville was a lesser part.