The Apocalyptic Adventures of Private Winfred Scott Biegle: or, Bullying to the End

by Clifford Davidson, Oscar Haugen (Afterword)

A modernist novel, describing a dystopian military in the imaginary dictatorship of Atlantis, written more than a half century ago when the author was a conscript in the army during the Cold War. As editor of the post newspaper at the Granite City Engineer Depot, Clifford Davidson was in a privileged position for observing the military mentality of the time, in particular the propensity for bullying intended to turn men into mindless killing machines. From other soldiers he was also able to hear disturbing stories at first hand about World War II and the very recent Korean War, only concluded four years earlier. Private Biegle was invented as an anti-hero to satirize those who those accepted authoritarianism as normative and patriotism as uncritical obedience. In other words, in the pages of the novel the author was exploring the very subversion of civil society by probing the implications of the master-slave dichotomy that had been introduced by Hegel and relatively recently put to good use in feminist thought by Jessica Benjamin. But the novel also deserves to be understood as an antic expression that foreshadows the media personality Stephen Colbert, who has popularized irony for so many in this century. Those who have read it have declared it "a good read." A critical introduction to the writing of this Orwellian novel and its relation to literature of the mid-twentieth century is provided by Oscar Haugen in the Afterword. The Apocalyptic Adventures of Winfed Scott Biegle is a work previously only known to a few readers, and now is available to a larger readership in the present edition.

164 pages, Paperback

Published August 29, 2012