Days Without End

“I only say it because without saying I don’t think anything can be properly understood. How we were able to see slaughter without flinching. Because we were nothing ourselves, to begin with.”

As Thomas discusses his memory of the fever sheds in Canada, where he was quarantined after fleeing a famine-ridden Ireland, he claims that he must say things to understand them. However, this is one aspect of his history which he shies away from describing. Ironically, Thomas’s lack of description still offers a certain kind of understanding—given the horrors of his later life, which he discusses without issue, his silence on the topic of the fever sheds suggests the depth of the violence he witnessed there.

“The mind is a wild liar and I don’t trust much in it that I find there. To tell a story I have to trust it but I can issue a warning like a ticket master issuing a ticket for a western-bound train that will be obliged to go through wilderness, Indians, outlaws, and storms.”

Though Thomas does not necessarily meet the definition of an unreliable narrator, his assessment of stories and memory here reminds audience that he is a subjective narrator, which may lead to certain factual inaccuracies, though not intentional ones. The narrative of the novel is thus less patterned after strict history than it is on a certain person’s perspective of that history. Thomas here also offers a bit of foreshadowing, as his narrative contains all the things listed in his “warning.”

“There didn’t seem to be anything alive, including ourselves. We were dislocated, we were not there, now we were ghosts.”

In the aftermath of his first real experience with killing, during which the company of soldiers massacre the Yurok villagers, Thomas reflects on the whirlwind of emotions that affect the soldiers. His suggestion that those who have done the killing are also no longer alive offers a commentary on what it costs to commit genocidal violence, and how doing such a terrible deed may destroy one’s humanity.

“But the grandeur of the line of riders affected us too. We were about the people’s business, we had done something for the people. Something like that. Puts a fire in your belly somehow. Sense of rightness. Not justice exactly. Fulfilling the wishes of the majority, something along those lines, I don’t know. That’s how it was with us.”

The narrative voice of an elder Thomas mixes with the experiences of the younger Thomas as he recalls getting swept up in the townsfolk’s pride after the company of soldiers massacred the Yurok villagers. While the past Thomas is affected and consumed by his own grandeur, narrator Thomas inserts doubt that shifts “rightness” to “the wishes of the majority” (37) before conceding that he doesn’t know what it was. This rapid decrease in moral justification reflects how age and perspective have led Thomas to question the position of his past self.

“Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. Hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now.”

This excerpt, which invokes the title of the novel, describes the feeling of immortality possessed by the young Thomas, as mediated through the views of an older Thomas. The use of “we” describes the perspective of the group of men in the company, but also suggests a universality to this sentiment. Barry thus proposes a feeling of eternality as something inherent to youth.

“Sergeant said no one likely ever understood Indians. They’d had their damn chance to kill us and they hadn’t took it. Goddamn stupid Injuns, coyotes had more sense.”

Wellington, who possesses an extreme racist hatred for Native peoples, here falsely conflates his own racist ideology with intelligence. Because he hates Native Americans, he assumes that violence between them and white people is a natural state and is thus unable to recognize kindness and generosity, instead marking it as stupidity.

“Sometimes when you’re far from the sweet bells of town nothing comes out to you. Feels like they forget you. The goddamned boys in blue.”

Thomas laments the thanklessness of army work, despite the rhetoric that exists around celebrating the heroism of soldiers. With this, Barry underscores one of the ways in which his novel deviates from many war novels and westerns; army life, he suggests, is rarely one characterized by glory.

“They say Starling Carlton killed men in his time outside the law but no one knows for sure.”

This passage denotes an ongoing concern of the novel, one which is never entirely reconciled: the difference between unlawful killing—killing as part of an army or war—and killing when necessary and thus presumably righteous (though further doubt is continually cast on this concept throughout the novel). The brief attention paid to Starling’s potential crimes before he was part of the army suggests a lack of concern about the truth of this story, indicating an acceptance of a gray morality among the soldiers.

“Indians look very puzzled, surprised and offended to be shot but they go to the wall with noble mien I must allow.”

Barry here alludes to the racist “noble savage” stereotype popular among Europeans and white Americans in the 19th century. This stereotype cast Native Americans as proud and possessing a deep connection to nature that was used to justify violent efforts to “civilize” the “innocent and childlike” Native peoples. Though Thomas is often disturbed by particularly violent and racist acts against Native Americans, Barry here shows that his narrator is not immune to perpetuating racist stereotypes.

“I guess love laughs at history a little.”

While Thomas comments on the irony of Caleb Booth partnering with an Oglala Sioux woman even after being shot through the face in a conflict with a group of Oglala Sioux, this line also applies to Thomas and John’s relationship. Though the novel contains overtones of anti-gay bias in that Thomas and John keep their relationship secret from the greater public, Barry simultaneously presents them with an optimistic future. Though the couple face many challenges, their love does not waver, and despite the major conflicts of history in which they find themselves embroiled, they still find happiness and even marriage in their life together.

“Our sorrow spiralling to heaven. Our courage spiralling to heaven. Our disgrace entangled in it like sorrow and courage was so much briars.”

Thomas recounts the mix of emotion he feels at battling the Sioux pointing to the one of the novel’s central themes—Moments of Humanity in War. Though he continues to have mixed emotions about doing his duty to the army as he faces more and more battles, his sense of triumph and victory lessen, taken over increasingly by a sadness and a sense that the conflict between Native peoples and white Americans is, if not outright injustice, at least a shame.

“But at the end what [Wellington] said to me was, he didn’t know what life was for. He just said that. He said it seemed very short looking back even though it had seemed long enough when he was getting through it.”

At the end of his life, Wellington expresses disillusionment with the purpose of living. While Wellington’s assertion that life feels short conflicts with young Thomas’s feeling of eternality, Wellington’s viewpoint does not quite align with elder Thomas’s either. Thomas’s reflections comment on a life well lived with love at its center; Wellington, whose character seems defined by hate for Native Americans, lacks this comfort.

“We may be black-hearted men when our turn comes but there is a seam in men called justice that nothing burns off complete.”

This excerpt indicates the pervasive optimism that Thomas maintains despite the horrors he witnesses. Though the tone of Barry’s novel is not overtly optimistic, this line underscores the novel’s stance that goodness and justice remain possible even when the brutality man is capable of seems to be omnipresent.

“I been nursing this thought, I guess like a preacher nurses a vision of revelation, you know, of Thomas in his dress and being just as ladylike as a lady, only more so, everything done just so, and aiming for beauty, you know, and he is a beauty, ain’t he!”

This excerpt, spoken by John Cole, indicates how Thomas’s growing identification with womanhood is available to his partner. Additionally, the idea that Thomas could be more ladylike than a lady—a notion comprehensible both to Noone and to his audience—suggests that even in a society that naturalizes gender, the effects of intentional gendering are perceptible to a broader public.

“We’re holding hands then like lovers who have just met or how we imagine lovers might be in the unknown realm where lovers act as lovers without concealment.”

This stolen moment in the dark between Thomas and John is simultaneously tragic and hopeful. Though the couple struggle to imagine a world in which they can be together publicly (though they do achieve a version of it intermittently when Thomas passes while wearing women’s clothing), they are also able to find a quiet moment of innocent love, despite the many struggles they’ve been through and horrors they have seen.

“No one can best imagine the motley crowd that go to make a American town. First you got the have-nothing know-everything goddamn Irish God damn them who will live under leaky steps and count themselves in palaces. Then you got the half-breed Indians mixed with God knows what. Then you got the black, maybe they came up from Carolina or them places. Then you got the Chinese and the Spanish families.”

Barry, through Thomas, points out the multicultural aspect that “[makes up an] American town” while also demonstrating—seemingly through reported speech rather than Thomas’s own perspective—the racist views attached to each community by a hegemonic white position. In so doing, Barry suggests that racism is woven in, perhaps inextricably, to American history.

“Something building in the hearts of the soldiers, if you could see that thing it might have strange wings. Something fluttering in their breasts and then a great clattering of wings.”

When he begins fighting in the Civil War, Thomas notes a difference between the attitude of the soldiers than when he fought in the American Indian Wars. Unlike in the war against Native Americans, in which the men were motivated by desperation and duty or hatred (as in the case of Wellington), the Union soldiers are motivated by a sense of patriotism.

“How come God wants us to fight like goddamn heroes and then be some bit of burned flesh that even the wolves don’t want.”

Thomas invokes the idea that the American concept of nation-building is a project ordained by a Christian God. Though his comment here does not explicitly challenge such an idea, it does express some doubt, particularly when contrasted with the image of men reduced to charred corpses, contrasting the lofty ideals of nationhood with the gritty realities of war.

“Why should a man care about another man? No need, the world don’t care about that. World is just a passing parade of cruel moments and long drear stretches where nothing going on but chicory drinking and whisky and cards. No requirement for nothing else tucked in there. We’re strange people, soldiers stuck out in wars.”

Though Thomas’s words here are pessimistic, their context gives them an tone of hope; he thinks this as Lige, who is being discharged from the Civil War following an injury, promises to keep in touch. Thomas remembers Lige’s kindness during John’s illness—one of several noted Moments of Humanity in War. The question of why a man should care about another when there is no need becomes an articulation of the capacity of man for compassion, even in the midst of conflict.

“Winona, the queen of this o’erwhelming country.”

Thomas looks at his adopted daughter as she bravely volunteers to return to the Sioux—a people she has not seen in many years—due to the kindness that the now-deceased Mrs. Neale once showed her and he admires her goodness. The use of the contracted “o’erwhelming” invokes “The Star-Spangled Banner,” an icon of Americanness, even as Thomas refers to Winona as a “queen”—a form of leadership which the United States was formed to oppose. The pairing of these two images, that of majesty and royalty and that of consummate Americanness, coalesce in the image of Winona, a Sioux girl, underscoring the insistence of Barry’s novel that the positive elements of the American project are predominantly found in unlikely places.

“Now Major Neale reaches our section. You’re to fall on them, men, and leave nothing alive. Not a blade of grass standing. Kill them all. These ain’t words the major knows.”

Major’s turn to bloodthirstiness and a desire for vengeance after the death of his wife and daughter suggest that nobility and high-mindedness are worn down by the brutalities of war. In undermining Major’s longstanding moral high ground, Barry argues that there is no way to be at once noble and morally correct and to take part in genocidal violence.

“I feel a woman more than I ever felt a man, though I were a fighting man most of my days. Got to be thinking them Indians in dresses shown my path.”

As Thomas claims her preferred gender identity, she thinks back to the two-spirit Native Americans she encountered during her youth. This attribution recognizes gender as something that coincides with lived experience (though Thomas identifies as a woman, she adopts her “masculine version” without significant regret when circumstances call for it) without compromising her sense of self.

“A daughter not a daughter but who I mother best I can.”

Thomas’s love for and unofficial relationship with Winona both allow Thomas to understand herself as a woman, emphasizing the novel’s theme of Gender, Sexuality, and Queer Family-Making. Though she recognizes, at the end of the novel, that treating Winona as her and John’s natural daughter elides the violence that brought them all together, her framing here suggests that if Winona is “a daughter not a daughter” then Thomas can be, in parallel, a mother not a mother—or, further, a woman who was not assigned female at birth.