The Caine Mutiny is a military novel in the manner of Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens. It offers a formal view of military life from the perspectives of officers who, for the most part, are committed to that life and believe strongly in the values that it embodies as well as those that it protects. Wouk sees little irony in the practical necessity of a strong, authoritarian institution serving the needs of a democratic society. This slant makes for a strong contrast between Wouk’s novel and a long line of American novels from Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage and John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers to James Jones’s The Thin Red Line, Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions, and even Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, in which the emphasis has been on the ordinary citizen-soldier’s grudging adjustment to military duty. (Interestingly, the novel contains its own counterpoint in the novel, Multitudes, Multitudes, being written by one of its characters, a politically progressive young officer named Tom Keefer.)
At its center, The Caine Mutiny is a novel of initiation and maturation, for its events very much transform a young officer named Willie Keith. Born into affluence and privilege, Keith has indulged in some mild dissipation while working as a nightclub entertainer. When the United States enters World War II following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Keith enlists, attends classes at Columbia University to earn a midshipman’s rank, and is assigned to an old converted destroyer, the USS Caine. The events on board the ship force Keith to examine his values and to make choices on serious issues. He comes to recognize, in both his professional and personal lives, that being responsible involves not just defining one’s convictions but maintaining one’s integrity while wrestling with the ambiguous ramifications of almost every choice. Even the best-considered decision may have unforeseen and even ironic consequences and implications.
Shortly after Keith joins the USS Caine, it gets a new captain, Commander Philip Queeg. Almost immediately, the men on the Caine recognize that Queeg is a difficult eccentric. Obsessed with enforcing an adherence to every regulation and treating every infraction with equal severity, Queeg is a judgmental authoritarian who lacks the capacity for sound judgment. This impression of him is reinforced when the ship takes to sea, and Queeg seems unable to cope with any conditions that require quick thinking and a flexible response. His behavior is particularly surprising given that the Caine’s assignments generally take it to the backwaters of the war effort in the Pacific. Indeed, when the Caine does participate in a frontline combat mission, supporting landing craft during the attack on Kwajalein, Queeg is so overcome by his indecisiveness that he orders the Caine away from, rather than toward, the beaches. It is unclear whether he is afflicted with a paralyzing form of obsessive-compulsive disorder or whether he is actually suffering from cowardice. But he convinces everyone that he is dangerously unfit for command when he orders that a yellow dye be dumped overboard to mark where he has separated the Caine from the landing craft that it has been assigned to shield.
Relying on a casual knowledge of psychology, Tom Keefer has much earlier diagnosed Queeg as a neurotic who is inclined toward paranoia. He has even laid out the legal case for seizing command of the ship should Queeg become dangerously unstable. Another officer, Steve Maryk, who has been a commercial fisherman in civilian life, takes the more pragmatic approach of documenting all of Queeg’s idiosyncratic orders and actions. It is hard to tell with complete certainty whether Queeg’s apparent paranoia is actually a recognition of his junior officers’ willingness to mutiny or whether his paranoia is self-fulfilling, creating the response that seems to justify it. In any case, when the ship is caught in a typhoon in the Philippine Sea and Queeg begins to furiously issue incoherent and even contradictory orders, the mutiny, led by Maryk but supported by Keefer and Keith, does occur.
Of course, Maryk faces a court-martial after the ship comes to port. As the case is prepared, Queeg gets enough rest away from the stress of command to recover his composure. In fact, the case seems to be leaning much in his favor when naval psychiatrists examine him and find him of sound mind and capable of sound judgment. But Maryk’s lawyer is a young Jewish aviator named Barney Greenwald who understands intuitively how irritating Queeg in small increments will eventually cause him to exhibit the sort of rash behavior that led to the mutiny. Greenwald eventually provokes an outburst from Queeg that saves the careers of Maryk, Keefer, and Keith.
But, following that climactic scene, Wouk provides a denouement that radically changes the thematic direction of the novel. For, when Greenwald joins the celebration being thrown by the Caine’s officers, he creates considerable consternation by asserting that Queeg, not they, represents the best hope against fascism. Many of Greenwald’s relatives have suffered and perished at the hands of the Nazis, and given the scope of the threat posed by fascism, Queeg’s long military service, his demonstrated commitment to the defense of American values and human freedoms, weighs more, Greenwald argues, than his eccentricities, regardless of how much they may have endangered a particular crew. The military has ultimately not protected one of its own, and it has thereby endangered itself and undermined the war effort. Although Greenwald has clearly been drinking before joining the officers’ celebration, his self-doubt about what they have accomplished by ruining Queeg resonates just enough to make the resolution of the case a more profound issue than that addressed in court, an issue that cannot be resolved by adjudication.
The novel was adapted into a very successfully staged courtroom drama titled The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, and it was then adapted to film as The Caine Mutiny, with Humphrey Bogart providing a riveting performance as Queeg.
Sources
Beichman, Arnold. Herman Wouk: The Novelist as Social Historian. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2004.
Clurman, Harold, and William Appleman Williams. “The Mutiny That’s Raising Cain.” Nation, March 1954, pp. 260–261.
Geisnar, Maxwell. “The Age of Wouk.” Nation, November 1955, pp. 399–400.
Goertschacher, Wolfgang, and Holger Klein, eds. Krieg auf der Buhne, 369–387. Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 1997.
Shapiro, Edward. “The Jew as Patriot: Herman Wouk and American Jewish Identity.” American Jewish History 84 (December 1996): 333–351.
Steele, John. “Novel.” American Heritage 51 (May/June 2000): 72.
Wouk, Herman. The Caine Mutiny. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951.
Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis, War Literature
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