Can someone help me out on this? Regarding The Killer Angels, the pulitzer prize winning novel?

Question

From my understaning, pulitzer prize winning books win this award due to the fact that the story normally holds a moral or irony or life-lesson. I am currently reading The Killer Angels and am honestly stumped on what it is. I am normally one of the smarter english people I know, and can normally decifer things such as this quite easily. But this book has me beat lol. The only thing I could see that might be the moral, or the irony, or the overhanging subject that isn't directly stated is the fact that the generals in this story are fighting for their individual sides, and yet joined the military to protect the country as a whole, and they now fight their other countrymen in order to defend their rights and opinions. I'm not sure if that is it, but I'd love to know if it is or isn't, and if it isn't, someone please give me some input. I feel like I can't get it :/

Answer 1

I think the major lesson to be learned from Killer Angels is that sometimes there is no black and white, good and evil. Coming from the North, history classes made the South look like a bunch of ignorant, racist, rednecks who deserved a whooping in the war. (Now that I live in the South, the way history is taught is completely different!) I think one of the major things to take away from the book is how they were fighting each other. They all had friends "on the other side" that they were shooting and killing. And it wasn't clear who was right and wrong--they were all fighting for different reasons, and willing to die for these beliefs. You're really made to sympathize with both sides, and walk away with a deeper understanding that war is not always an easy thing to define.