ABSTRACT
There are resemblances between Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and the contemporary novelist Tim O'Brien. Both produced elegant narratives about the experience of war and what it meant for their manhood. Holmes's narratives ran against the grain of the war memoir genre. For notwithstanding their received image as bearers of heroic valor, combat soldiers as a class are wont in public to treat their individual achievements with the air of earnest self-effacement. While different aspects of Holmes's narrative of war will be examined, one issue should be flagged at the outset. Professor Louis Menand had forwarded the thesis that an objection to racism was a crucial motivation for Holmes's enlistment in the military. Holmes's narrative was thus an inversion of the Book of Job. There, another proud man learned, after an excruciating hazing, that his manliness was an illusion of strength, just another thing at the mercy of God's unquestionable whim.
