Text by Michael Mullen, Professor of English, Vincennes (IN) University

In the introduction to the limited edition facsimile of the first chapter of Whistle, published in 1977, Jones wrote: "...when Whistle is completed, it will surely be the end of something. At least for me. The publication of Whistle will mark the end of a long job of work for me." It would also mark the end of his life.

Jones's health was failing, he had congestive heart failure, and in his race to finish Whistle he worked harder than he ever had before, sometimes twelve to fourteen hours a day. While he did not live to complete the novel, for all practical purposes Whistle is a finished work. Jones intended the book to have thirty-four chapters. At the time of his death he had written thirty-one of them. Jones's friend, Willie Morris, was chosen to complete the book, a job Morris said was not difficult, for Jones "had already plotted in considerable, and indeed almost finished detail his remaining material." To construct the closing chapters, the last ten pages of the novel, Morris used the notes and tape recordings Jones had made, as well as information Jones gave Morris in conversation.

Whistle is the fictional treatment of the process Jones called the "de-evolution of a soldier," the final and most difficult part of the evolutionary process soldiers undergo. Having seen men in their most brutal state, it is impossible for them to return to civilian life with the innocence they left home with still intact. The result is that they cling to each other, their bond creating a protective wall between themselves and the society which cannot understand them. This is what happens to the characters in Whistle.

In an interview in 1973 when Touch of Danger was published, Jones also discussed Whistle, saying the novel would show "what happens to them [the carryover characters from Eternity and Thin Red Line] when they come into conflict with the affluent high living wartime society of 1943-44." What happens is that of the four central characters in the book, one goes crazy, one gets killed in a fight, and two commit suicide.

Not new to Jones, reviews of Whistle were divided, in this case between those who saw the book as a fitting end to his war trilogy, and those who found fault both with Jones's writing, and with his treatment of sex. Surprisingly, not many reviewers used the occasion of the publication of Jones's final novel to examine his career, but those who did tended to regard him as an unpolished but powerful chronicler of army life, a writer of somewhat limited talent whose works failed when he wrote about something besides the military.