Analysis Of March By Geraldine Brooks

March by Geraldine brooks is a novel about Mr. March a chaplain in the union army during the Civil War. The novel goes into the first-person accounts of March during his time in the army. March follows a man and his experiences and interactions during the brutal war. The book shows March’s views, reasons for him to join the army, his relationships with others, and his reactions toward what was going on around him. The novel March is a very important piece of literature with its interesting way of showing what life was like during that time. At the beginning of the book, March talks about his experience at the home of the Clements when he was younger. March stayed at the Clements plantation for a time which is when he would eventually start

In the novel March talks about his experiences during battles and after battles, detailing the brutality of the war. “When we came upon another turkey vulture, close enough to touch it. It was perched on the chest of a fallen man and turned its head sharply at our intrusion. A length of organ, glossy and brown, dangled from its beak.” (Brooks p. 15). During a battle where many men had died March was trying to help out the injured men and he saw vultures eating the wounded soldiers. While March was retreating he was still being fired upon by the enemy soldiers. They had to cross a river and while doing that, the wounded soldier that March was helping drowned. This experience and others like seeing killings and torture affected march greatly. Along with the atrocities he experienced on the battlefield, the conditions of the hospitals were also extremely terrible. The conditions of the field hospitals were awful. March described the hospitals as smelling like latrine trenches. Men were cramped together in rooms and there were not even enough beds or blankets for all of them. A surgeon would go from man to man seeing if he could do anything to help and if he felt he could not he would go to the next man. The battlefield was extremely brutal, and the hospitals that wounded soldiers were taken to was not much better than the conditions on the