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The Sergeant Poem Analysis

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A situation of misplacement can be found in “The Sergeant”. The forty-two-year-old narrator has received a draft notice even though he served in the army previously during the Korean War and achieved the rank of sergeant. The protagonist is returned to a southern army post from which he was discharged twenty years ago and is forced to resume the responsibilities of an army sergeant’s routine. He trains recruits, teaching them how to pull the pin from their hand grenades and how to keep a barracks clean. But he is subject to the same harassment and orders from officers that he gives to the soldiers. The lieutenant of his training company convinces the sergeant that their relationship will remain friendly if the sergeant lends him fifty dollars, …show more content…

You think God doesn’t know what He’s doing? I’m right here ministering to the Screaming Falcons of the Thirty-third Division and if God didn’t want me to be ministering to the wants and needs of the Screaming Falcons of the Thirty-third Division I wouldn’t be here, would I? (Sixty Stories 301)
Barthelme’s fictive world reflects a sense of social exhaustion and decay stated most specifically perhaps in “At the End of the Mechanical Age”: “The mechanical age is drawing to a close,” I said to her. “Or has already done so,” she replied. “It was a good age,” I said. “I was comfortable with it relatively. Probably I will not enjoy the age to come quite so much. I don’t like its look.” (Sixty Stories …show more content…

Neither Mrs. Davis nor the narrator appears discouraged by the need to find happiness without the aid of some supernatural being. The couple continues to search for an ideal, but only with the aid of standby generators which ensure the flow of

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