He falls in love with a Tonkinese woman, Liat, but is unable to marry her because he is about to help stage a military invasion of her home. “Fo’ Dollar” takes place after Cable’s lover dies. The narrator Joe Cable, writing to a woman he loves, analogizes his chronic itchiness to his and his comrades’ itches for sex, combat, and domination. In “Dry Rot,” hundreds of men become infected with a fungal infection. Several other episodes touch on the feelings of despair experienced by young men who might be in the prime of their youth if not for the war raging around them. Through this story, Michener makes an appeal for racial tolerance. She falls in love with the exotic colors of the South Pacific but is unable to tolerate the varying skin colors of DeBecque’s eight children, who were conceived outside of wedlock. Another story, “Our Heroine,” follows Nellie Forbush who wishes to court a rich French agriculture investor, Emile DeBecque.

Michener depicts the process of destroying the pines as unfeeling and evil, suggesting that any war victory is negated by the moral cost incurred by the human spirit. In the story, an old woman and a young girl with an intellectual disability work together to plant Norfolk Island with the very pines that the narrator is later sent to destroy. The section’s title alludes to a 1932 work, Mutiny on the Bounty.

The third, “Mutiny,” is told by a man who has been stationed in Norfolk Island in the South Pacific near the Australian coast, and instructed to cut down a large swathe of forest to enable the construction of a military base airstrip. The novel begins with two short narratives, “The South Pacific” and “Coral Sea.” These establish the setting and mood of the succeeding episodes, while hinting to the looming specter of World War II. Now known as Michener’s first novel, its status as such was in contention within the Pulitzer Prize board, which expanded its official definition of the genre in order to award Michener the Pulitzer for Best Novel in 1948. The book’s primary subject is World War II in particular, how real humans grappled emotionally and existentially with the intense and alienating moral atrocity of international war. Its plot is split into nineteen stories, each of which takes place as a direct consequence of the previous story, sharing the themes and characters of the others.

Tales of the South Pacific is a 1947 novel by American author James Michener.

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