The Armies of the Night
CRITIQUE | QUOTES
First editionSubtitle
History as a Novel, The Novel as History,
First publication
1968
Literature forms
Novel, memoir
Genres
Literary, journalism
Writing language
English
Author's country
United States
Length
Approx. 135,000 words
Notable lines
From the outset, let us bring you news of your protagonist.
— First line
At the moment of the arrest, cop and criminal knew each other better than mates, yes, an arrest was carnal.
If the republic was now managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho, the author was ready to cast much of the blame for such success into the undernourished lap, the overpsychologized loins, of the liberal academic intelligentsia. They were of course politically opposed to the present programs and movements of the republic in Asian foreign policy, but this political difference seemed no more than a quarrel among engineers. Liberal academics had no root of a real war with technology land itself, no, in all likelihood, they were the natural managers of that future air-conditioned vault where the last of human life would still exist.
One’s own literary work was the only answer to the war in Vietnam.
Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child – no one knows if legitimate – and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen.
For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise to sleep.
— Last lines
CRITIQUE | QUOTES
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