45 pages • 1 hour read
Charles FullerA Soldier's Play
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Tragedy of Internalized Racism
Through the characterization and character arc of Waters, the play depicts how internalized racism develops within an oppressed individual and the deeply harmful effects that can result.
In one of his few sympathetic moments, Waters tells Wilkie that he joined the military to obtain the most respect and power that he could have as a Black man: “I couldn’t do any better—and this army was the closest I figured the white man would let me get to any kind of authority” (Act I, page 28, emphasis added). Waters thus reveals the sense of insecurity and ambition that has driven him to curry favor with a system that discriminates against him: He is determined to gain the acceptance of white men, believing that if he accepts the racist system and proves his worth within it, he will be rewarded at last. He also believes and hopes that his son will not have to follow in his footsteps to achieve respect, and that even greater opportunities await his children as long as they learn how to model themselves on white people. He plans to send both his son and daughter to “some big white college—let ’em rub elbows with the whites, learn the white man’s language—how he does things” (Act I, page 28). To Waters, respectability and success are directly linked to whiteness and acceptance by white society, which leaves him feeling insecure and even resentful of his own Blackness.
For all his bluster, however, Waters is caught between two worlds without fully belonging to either. In the opening stage directions, Waters is described as a Black man with light skin. When combined with his expressed attitudes about Blackness, this suggests that he has lived his life feeling as if he is close to achieving whiteness, while at the same time knowing this dream is categorically unachievable. He is anguished by the limits he can’t reach past. As CJ remarks, “I feel kinda sorry for him myself. Any man ain’t sure where he belongs must be in a whole lotta pain” (Act I, page 45, emphasis added). Rather than blaming white people for holding on to their power and privilege to keep Black people oppressed, Waters blames those of his fellow Black people whom he sees as “unworthy” of white respect. He lashes out at his fellow oppressed Black people instead of directing his anger toward the real oppressors.
Shortly before his death, a drunken Waters rambles about how all of his efforts have been futile: “You got to be like them! And I was! I was—but the rules are fixed […] They still hate you!” (Act II, page 97). In recognizing that “the rules are fixed,” Waters belatedly realizes the delusion at the heart of his tragedy: Accommodating racism is a dead end, and only reinforces the barriers that keep men like him from being treated as equals.
The Endemic Nature of Racism
A Soldier’s Play explores the various ways in which racism manages to spread insidiously through every aspect of a society. While the play takes place in a single location—the military base—it uses the base as a microcosm for the wider systemic issues of discrimination and racism that are endemic in American society.
The racism in the military starts at the very top. The military powers refuse to treat Black soldiers as equal to enlisted white ones, even denying them—until toward the end of the play—the chance to fight in Europe, as the men hope to do. Instead, the Black soldiers are relegated to menial tasks as if they were servants or laborers instead of real soldiers. In one significant incident, Waters orders his men to paint the club that is exclusive to the white officers: The Black soldiers are pressured to perform menial labor in a white-only space that would otherwise strictly bar their presence under Jim Crow segregation laws. According to Peterson, Waters also worked the baseball team as if they were a chain gang, a form of labor in which (disproportionately Black) incarcerated people are forced to do back-breaking work for free, mimicking the model.
The Specter of Ethnic Cleansing
While the men on the base are far from the frontline violence of World War II in Europe, the specter of ethnic cleansing still haunts their interactions with the racist system that exploits and degrades them. In exploring the threat of violence and ethnic cleansing within the US, the play suggests that racial hatred and violence can become a threat anywhere, at any time.
While the Nazis are overseas committing ethnic genocide through the Holocaust, the Black Americans eager to go and fight the Nazis are, ironically, facing threats of their own right at home. The Ku Klux Klan is a constant threat, with one of the soldiers remarking that two Black soldiers have been murdered on the base already. The Black soldiers are thus constantly aware that the racial prejudices that surround them could erupt into ethnic cleansing at any moment. The atmosphere of threat is reinforced by how the white soldiers on the base also casually inflict racial violence and prejudice: They insult the Black soldiers and relegate them to menial jobs, and some even believe—as Byrd openly states—that any “disrespect” from a Black man is justification for murdering him.
The charged atmosphere of racial discrimination and hatred affects Waters, who, as a Black sergeant, ought to be a champion for his men’s well-being. Instead, he also engages in intimidation and degradation of his soldiers, heightening the sense that violence is never far away. What is worse, after CJ has been arrested, Waters visits him in jail and tells him, “Them Nazis ain’t all crazy—a whole lot of people just can’t fit into where things seem to be goin;—like you, CJ. The black race can’t afford you no more” (72). Waters is himself invested in a type of ethnic cleansing, by which he uses his small amount of power he has to remove from society any Black people whom he deems to be “inferior.”
Waters’s most chilling admission of violence is the story he tells about the man with intellectual disabilities whom he knew while stationed in World War I. After the man allowed the white men to dress him like a monkey and laugh at him, Waters and some of his peers murdered him in cold blood—an act he does not regret, as he is willing to commit egregious violence for the sake of “purifying” the Black race. In these ways, notions of ethnic cleansing and racial “purity” become serious preoccupations even on the military base, reflecting the wider systems of racial hatred and violence that are both destroying Europe during World War II and oppressing and threatening the Black soldiers still stationed in the United States.
