Jimmy Cross is one of the main characters of the novel. Senior Lieutenant, Jimmy Cross, carried letters from a girl, named Martha, who was studying at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. Martha stopped to write him any love letters, but Lieutenant Cross didn’t lose hope and put them in a plastic bag at the bottom of the box. In the evening, after the day's transition, he dived into his trench, rinsed his hands with water from a jar, unfolded letters and invented, taking them with his fingertips
He imagined romantic lodging in White Rocks in New Hampshire, and sometimes touched the edge of the envelope, because she also held the tongue on paper before gluing it. Most of all, he would like Martha to love him as much as he did her, but the letters were filled with chatter, but not with the sense of love. He was almost sure that she was still a girl. She studied at Mount Sebastian College in the English department and remarkably described teachers, girlfriends, exams as she admired Chaucer and was fond of Virginia Woolf, especially her quoted verses.
She didn’t mention the war, except "take care of yourself, Jimmy." Letters weighed several ounces and were signed as "Your Martha," but Lieutenant Cross knew that this signature was only a form of completion of the letter and didn’t have the meaning that he sometimes imagined in his head. With the advent of twilight, he neatly put the letters back into the duffel bag. Slowly and slightly confused, he got up, walked around his people, checked the guard and in full darkness returned to his trench, looked into the night and continued to think about whether she really was a girl.
Jimmy Cross Quotes
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rusack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.
When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war. You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the rain. You could blame the river. You could blame the field, the mud, the climate. You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame whole nations. You could blame God. You could blame the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate or an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote. In
Jimmy Cross in the Essays
Author: Erica Morris