A Late Encounter with the Enemy

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1953

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Character Analysis

General Sash

General Sash is the protagonist of “A Late Encounter With the Enemy,” as the story revolves around his alienation from his own history. General Sash is a static character in that his personality and values do not change until the final moments of both the story and his life, when he finally forced into a confrontation with the past he has been avoiding.

The first thing we are told about General Sash is that he is “a hundred and four years old” (153). Despite his age and the veneration that comes to him for having fought in the Civil War, he has no interest in history. He has forgotten many of the events of his life. He has forgotten the events of the Civil War, and he has even forgotten his own son. Further, while he is called the General, he was more likely a private in the Civil War, not a general. Even his name—General Tennessee Flintrock Sash—is false, invented for him by the promotors of a Hollywood film about the war. The premiere of this film, at which he was trotted onto the stage as a representative of local history, is the “one event in the past that had any significance for him” (155). This, too, he remembers incorrectly—while he remembers the “beautiful gul” (156) who gave him his uniform, Sally corrects him: Mr. Govisky presented him with the gift. In this false uniform, under a false name, the general is a symbol of a past that has been stripped of all reality and reduced to mere costume. This is just the way he likes it: a position that allows him to absorb the admiration of others—especially of “beautiful guls” without having to face his actual, painful memories.

At the graduation, the General has very little agency and can barely respond to his environment. He watches the ceremony from a wheelchair and is moved into various positions by his great-nephew. He must listen to the commencement speaker talk about the importance of history, that “if we forget our past […] we won’t remember our future and it will be as well for we won’t have one” (164). The General’s experience illustrates the truth in these words: he pointedly refuses to remember the past and tries to resist the speaker’s message and leave the ceremony, but he is unable to move. He feels “that he was running backward and the words were coming at him like musket fire” (165). The words evoke the past, and the General can no longer escape his past experiences of the war, his wife, his sons, or his mother. It is with these recollections in his mind that he dies, having finally faced the past he has been hiding from for so many years.

Sally Poker Sash

Like the General, Sally is resistant to social progress and clings to the past values embodied by her grandfather. Also like the General, Sally is a proud person whose sense of superiority is revealed to be unfounded. However, Sally’s fate after the General’s death is not confirmed in the story; it is not clear whether her grandfather’s sudden death will force her into a confrontation with reality similar to the one he experiences in his final moments.

Sally is a contradictory character, caught between the past and the future. She is 62 years old and has been a college student for 20 years, but she has yet to graduate. She is pursuing a degree that did not exist when she began her teaching career but is now a professional requirement. While she is fiercely loyal to her grandfather and the traditional values she believes he represents, she also corrects his recounting of the events in Atlanta, showing that she remains able to see his faults. These contradictions are symbolized by the spotlight at the movie premier, which “caught a weird moon-shaped slice of Sally Poker” (158)—she is half in, half out. At the premiere, Sally’s inability to assert herself is further highlighted as she finds that, “in the excitement of getting ready, she had forgotten to change her shoes” (159). Sally is onstage in a pair of “brown Girl Scout oxfords” (159) rather than the beautiful silver slippers she had wanted to wear to the event.

When it is Sally’s turn to shake the college president’s hand at her graduation ceremony, she feels an extra sense of pride having seen her grandfather. Despite his centrality to her life, she does not really see him as an autonomous human being: Instead, he is a symbol of her own nobility. She believes that her teachers and younger peers look down on her, and she wants them to see her grandfather in his uniform as evidence of her connection to a proud tradition. She doesn’t realize, as she holds her head high to receive her diploma, that the General and the values he personifies are likely already dead.

Sally’s future is uncertain at the end of the story. Following the ceremony, she awaits the General, sitting “on a bench in the shade” (166). She has not fully stepped out into the sun, which would signify her entry into reality. Closing before Sally has an opportunity to react to her grandfather’s death, the story remains ambiguous about whether an individual can change.

John Wesley

John Wesley is a secondary character who first appears towards the conclusion of “A Late Encounter With the Enemy.” John Wesley’s caring for the General at Sally’s graduation interrogates the future’s engagement with the values the General represents.

John Wesley is established as a personification of the family’s future. Rather than living in the anonymous Southern town with Sally and the General, John Wesley lives with “other relatives” in the North who come “down to the graduation” (140). Further, John Wesley is identified as a “Boy Scout,” a young person being trained in the values deemed to be desirable for future leaders and citizens. One of the most striking descriptions of John Wesley, as “a fat blond boy of ten with an executive expression” (140), aligns him with the comfort and prosperity of post–World War II America and the period’s economic and commercial expansion.

John Wesley’s actions during the graduation symbolize the future generation’s abandonment of the General’s values. John Wesley has complete control over the General, who is in a wheelchair and unable to move around by himself. Sally, however, imagines “that clean young Boy Scout stoutly wheeling his chair across the stage” (140). At the time, she “imagined that John Wesley had the old man ready,” however, she is startled to see them still outside: John Wesley has abandoned the General in favor of a Coca-Cola. This image symbolizes the shifting values of American culture—John Wesley’s generation cares about neither the past nor the values held by the General’s generation; they care only for the future and the gratification offered by mass-produced pleasures like Coca-Cola. This lack of consideration is emphasized throughout the ceremony—John Wesley “bump[s]” (141) the General into the hall and “t[akes] a big bow” (142) himself when the General’s name is called.

The story’s final image emphasizes John Wesley’s attitude toward the General. Immediately following the ceremony, John Wesley takes his grandfather out “the back way and roll[s] him at high speed down a flagstone path” (144). It is John Wesley who is in control, and he chooses to join the “long line” of people waiting for “the Coca-Cola machine” (144). Indeed, numerous people wait for the Coca-Cola machine, so oblivious to the General that they do not realize he is dead.