SOURCE: Karagueuzian, Maureen. “Irony in Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 24, no. 2 (winter 1983): 65-73.

In the following essay, Karagueuzian notes ironic parallels between Dog Soldiers and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, asserting that Stone underscores the inadequacy of Hemingway's moral and aesthetic vision by contrasting the nihilism and dissipation of Vietnam-era American drug-runners with Hemingway's expatriate Americans.

The ironic tension in Robert Stone's second novel is powerful, but its sources are difficult to isolate, as one reviewer has pointed out, citing examples of statements that, excerpted from the text, “sound exceedingly flat.”¹ What is basic to Stone's irony is that the plot of Dog Soldiers (1974) parallels America's involvement in Vietnam; once this is clear, the novel becomes impossible to read solely at face value. Moreover, Stone compounds his irony by literary allusion: using Hemingway's world as backlight to call up ideals against which the...